Crypto: Terraform Admin Blames Jane Street Alleged Insider Trading For...
Terraform Labs administrator Todd Snyder accused Jane Street of communicating with the now-collapsed firm and trading on the information, hastening its collapse.
The court-appointed administrator leading crypto company Terraform Labs through its bankruptcy has sued trading firm Jane Street, accusing it of insider trading that worsened the collapse of the multibillion-dollar Terra ecosystem.
On Monday, Todd Snyder, Terraform’s court-appointed administrator, sued Jane Street, its co-founder Robert Granieri, and employees Bryce Pratt and Michael Huang in a Manhattan federal court, accusing them of “misappropriating confidential information and manipulating market prices.”
The heavily redacted complaint claimed Jane Street used connections with “Terraform insiders to learn material non-public information” about the company and used the information to sell off tokens tied to the Terra blockchain that worsened its collapse.
Jane Street told Cointelegraph it will defend itself over the “baseless, opportunistic claims.”
“This desperate suit is a transparent attempt to extract money when it is well-established that the losses suffered by Terra and Luna holders were the result of a multi-billion dollar fraud perpetrated by the management of Terraform Labs,” the firm said.
Terraform collapsed in May 2022 after its token, TerraUSD, an algorithmic stablecoin, lost its peg to the US dollar, leading to a death spiral that also saw the Terra token collapse and wipe out $40 billion.
Terraform filed for bankruptcy in the US in 2024 and its co-founder, Do Kwon, was later arrested and pleaded guilty in the US to two fraud charges. He was sentenced to 15 years in prison in December.
Snyder’s lawsuit claimed Jane Street got information that allowed it to sell off “hundreds of millions of dollars in potential exposure at precisely the right time, mere hours before the Terraform ecosystem collapsed.”
According to the suit, Jane Street onboarded Terraform for trading in 2018, but its trading of Terra tokens “did not take off” until 2022, after Pratt, a former Terraform intern, reestablished communication with his old teammates.
Source: CoinTelegraph
