Notice: Charts are from over the weekend. Obviously a lot has happened today (Monday) that this does not cover. This is just about the actions of the mystery address that was dumping ETH

Over the weekend, wallet 0x6b671b51258db0316dd89bc0075d6113488be5e8 made its way around CT with all sorts of speculation about what was going on. Most of this centered around the rapid-fire transactions, selling 1000 ETH at a time for UST. This is partly true, the wallet did sell a lot of ETH and did buy a lot of UST. But, this isn't Twitter so let's look at what actually happened with an open mind about the possible intentions and outcome, eh?

(timestamps on the charts are UTC)

The wallet in question performed about 60 swaps over a 4 hour period, offloading $137.6mm of ETH into USDT, ultimately market selling 54,443.13 ETH.

They subsequently swapped into UST 8 times, taking advantage of the market volatility and netting $2.6mm in arb profit on $106.4mm USDT sold.

Now, a lot of conversation has happened around why this wallet made such big moves and most of that is centered around maintaining the peg to 1 USD. So, let's compare. Could this wallet have made $2.6mm by staying on Terra?

Does 1 UST = 1 UST?

Below is the average UST price per Terra block, as taken from actual swap data.

At 21:00 UTC on 5/7, Terra address terra1885dgdvn5u8sjfaefvr39arssaxgqmd29ht0aa repays 30mm in borrowed UST on Anchor and gets to work. Over the ensuing hours, the user pays down loans and unbonds bETH. This is subsequently sent through the Wormhole to our ETH address above where the festivities begin.

(timestamps on table are localized)

The local low for UST is 0.998112 and this occurs around block 7548600-7548900, or around 22h (UTC) on May 7th.

First, there's a significantly greater amount of volatility going on here. We see 2 local minimums below 0.98, around block 14,732,450 (22:30 UTC, 5/7) and again around block 14,733,350 (2am UTC, 5/8).

In short, no, the wallet could not have arbed the peg on Terra because the core UST peg, the one on chain, never deviated below 0.998. The whale managed to capture $2.6mm on $106.4mm in USDT swap volume for a nice 2.3% arb.

Notice that not all of the ETH that was sold into USDT was swapped into UST. The wallet left roughly $30mm in Tether and has been moving it around to various places, such as this 14mm transfer to what looks like a Binance relayer.

Where are the Funds now?

109mm UST was sent, via Wormhole, to Terra where they have been incredibly busy since, distributing these funds to a number of wallets.

Further, they topped the account up with a further $237mm and split this among a few wallets, including $136mm to terra19prvtg0g32x6044xw87nj2xpslgynads5qqqqq which then spread the funds around even further.

... I need a map to do the rest of this.

More data to come, but so far it looks like this entity has been very busy this morning. All of the recipients of these funds are emptying their clip into LUNA.

ETH Swaps