The drop in the price of the yEarn.Finance token (YFI) on Thursday to $12,400 — the lowest since late August — could have been sparked by FTX founder and Alameda’s Sam Bankman-Fried. Such speculation arose on the Chinese social network Weibo, according to NewsBTC.
A user of the microblogging service @Crypto Apprentice posted a series of screenshots that, he says, support this hypothesis.
According to posts on Weibo, Bankman-Fried initially placed native tokens of the exchange FTX (FTT) and the decentralised trading platform Serum (SRM) into the liquidity pool of the crypto lending DeFi protocol Cream.
Presumably they were used as collateral to attract assets into three DeFi tokens — Uniswap (UNI), Curve (CRV) and yEarn.Finance (YFI).
Julien Thevenard, who represents Fabric Ventures, said the wallet held $72 million in FTT tokens, suggesting the plausibility of these suspicions.
“Yesterday they borrowed 2.7M UNI and 165 YFI and sent them to Binance. Since then they have repaid 1.3M UNI. Interestingly, they hold 14M SushiSwap (SUSHI) there,” he wrote.
If you want to look for yourself, this wallet might be Alameda’s because it has $72M in FTT.
They have borrowed 2.7M UNI + 165 YFI (+ no CRV) yesterday and sent them to Binance. They have repaid 1.3M UNI since.
Interestingly they hold 14M Sushi there!https://t.co/Lo8CAMmV21 https://t.co/MyRbAfQhjD
— Julien Thevenard (@JulienThevenard) October 7, 2020
@Crypto Apprentice also posted a screenshot of a chat with an unknown user allegedly with Bankman-Fried. In the fragment shown, the first asks the second whether he would short UNI and YFI, to which the response is “possibly” and a smiley.
Screenshot of the purported dialogue with the head of FTX, in which he entertains the possibility of shorting UNI and YFI. Source: Weibo.
None of the screenshots include specific dates for the events.
According to CoinGecko, at the time of writing YFI had pared its daily decline to 0.6%. It is now valued at $15,211, having traded as low as $12,409 intraday. The all-time high, set on September 13, stands at $43,337. On August 18, YFI became more expensive than Bitcoin.
Earlier ForkLog reported a 31.3% drop in YFI over the last seven days. Along with SUSHI and UNI, the coin has been one of the main underperformers in the DeFi sector’s market-cap slump.
Earlier this month, yEarn.Finance founder Andre Cronje began work on a new project, Eminence. Three weeks before its launch, a hacker withdrew $15 million, using the ecosystem deployed for testing.
On October 7, the yEarn.Finance developers announced an update to the yVaults storage, aimed at increasing its flexibility and security.
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