Crypto markets have taken a historically bad beating these past few months. Since November, the total market cap of all cryptocurrencies is down roughly 70%
This chart shows the crypto markets peaking at $3 trillion before starting a (somewhat) steady
decline.
Roughly $2 Trillion dollars has exited the crypto ecosystem in just a few months. But It wasn’t until this May that wheels really started to fall off… Starting with the collapse of Terra Luna.
This chart is something you have to see to believe.
It’s a straight line to zero.
In just a matter of days, more than $50B dollars was wiped out in the Terra Luna bloodbath
What led to Terra’s sudden crash?
It happened when Terra’s algorithmically backed stablecoin - USTerra (or $UST), lost its peg to the dollar. $UST was heavily integrated into DeFi platforms across the crypto ecosystem. When it became clear that the $UST stablecoin was no longer stable - it was game over for Terra - and major pain for anyone connected to the Terra ecosystem.
According to a report by Forbes:
“The crash bankrupted many investors and pulled down the entire crypto market with it:
over $400 billion in value was wiped out in terms of crypto market capitalization.”
Massachusetts senator and crypto adversary, Elizabeth Warren had this to say about the Terra
collapse:
“People have lost their life savings through crypto investments, and there aren’t enough
protections in place to safeguard consumers from these risks,”
The next big domino to fall was Celsius - a centralized lending and borrowing platform for
cryptocurrencies.
In May, Celsius reported having nearly $12 billion in assets under management. Soon after the Terra crash - and with crypto prices dropping fast, rumors began to circulate that Celsius might be insolvent - meaning, they didn’t have enough money to pay back all their
debts.
This led to the now infamous tweet by Celsius founder & CEO, Alex Mashinsky - who assured
us all that Celsius was just fine (xii):
Well it turns out Celsius was not fine. Just two days after the tweet from Mashinsky, Celsius would indeed pause all user withdrawals from their network.
This was the message posted to the Celsius website on June 13th (xiii):
Billions of dollars of user funds are still locked in the Celsius platform. It’s been several weeks
since the draconian measures were announced - and Celsius has yet to provide any timeline for a resolution.
It’s been reported that Goldman Sachs is raising $2 billion buy Celsius in the event of
bankruptcy (xiv).
This report has not yet been confirmed by Goldman Sachs or Celsius.
The third major crypto-domino to fall in the past few weeks is Three Arrows Capitals - also
known as 3AC.
They are - or were - a well-respected crypto hedge fund, that at its peak managed over $18
billion in assets - and was heavily invested in major crypto projects across the board, including
Voyager Digital and BlockFi - both of which are facing financial troubles of their own as a result of the 3AC fallout (xv).
It turns out that 3AC was borrowing money recklessly from wherever they could get it - and that the vast majority of their assets were bought using debt (xv).
As asset prices collapsed and margin calls were triggered, 3AC could no longer hold together its string of over leveraged positions.
And late last month we get this headline from Crypto World.
So what’s next for Three Arrows Capital? According to blockchain researcher and whistleblower @fatmanterra (xvii):
And what does all this mean for the crypto markets in the weeks ahead (xvii)? @FatManTerra
has this to say…
We’ve endured some serious pain in the crypto markets these past few months - and in
particular the past 8-weeks.
The dust from the devastation is not yet settled. The ground is still shaking beneath our feet.
And at the same time - while we’re feeling the sharp pains of an ecosystem in contraction…
Comments