Justin Sun prints $800M in little-used stablecoin
The billionaire trader raised eyebrows today by minting a massive sum of an unusual stable
WindAwake/Shutterstock modified by Blockworks
On Friday afternoon, HTX board member Justin Sun undertook a mass printing of the little-used stablecoin TUSD, a move that caught the attention of traders as over $815 million entered circulation in less than 15 minutes.
Starting at 11:45 am ET, data from Tronscan shows that $815 million TUSD was minted directly to the Tron blockchain across a series of 10 transactions. Each of the mints was to a new address, which then immediately sent funds to the Huobi 2 hot wallet.
Prior to these transactions, the last TUSD mint to Tron was seven days ago.
Shortly after these deposits, a series of nine transactions from the Huobi 2 address sent TUSD totaling roughly $815 million to a well-known and closely-watched address managed by Justin Sun.
The funds were then sent to an unlabeled contract whose code refers to it as “minterproxy.” Minterproxy then sent $865 million in TUSD to another address, which in turn burned the tokens.
However, the TUSD burns happen to align almost perfectly with mints of stUSDT. Across 10 transactions, $865 million stUSDT were minted to Sun’s address. Sun then deposited the stUSDT to Tron-based lending platform JustLend over a series of six transactions.
The deposits today now account for half of Sun’s $1.5 billion JustLend position, per Tronscan.
StUSDT is a staked USDT product that currently yields 4.2%, with claims that the yield comes from real-world assets (RWAs). According to the stUSDT website, which Blockworks viewed via a proxy as United States IP addresses are geofenced, the yield is generated via “high-grade short-term government bonds.”
Per DeFiLlama data, JustLend’s total value locked (TVL) increased 17% to $4.63 billion following the deposits.
In a recent statement to CryptoSlate, a Tether spokesperson said that stUSDT was “an independent project and is not affiliated with Tether.” Additionally, in July, TUSD parent company Archblocks co-founder accused Sun of acquiring TUSD through various shell companies.
Sun, who was charged with fraud and other securities laws violations by the SEC in March, said in a statement to Blockworks that the transactions were related to his personal fund and not Huobi business.
Updated Sept. 20, 2023 at 4:50 pm ET: This article has been been updated to remove a quote given on background.
Don’t miss the next big story – join our free daily newsletter.
