Rumours are swirling around Twitter & Reddit about a potential coordinated attack on the $UST peg. Here's a simple thread to summarise and explain what's being hypothesised π§΅
First a second-hand account of the sequence that led to the initial de-peg: in short, an attacker with 3bn in borrowed BTC & 1bn in UST waited for the Terra team to remove $UST liquidity from Curve to dump it all on the market & create panic
By selling $BTC to protect the $UST peg, @LFG_org may have made things worse and exacerbated the panic in the wider market. And since the attacker was potentially using borrowed $BTC, it also made him richer
So who's behind this? Citadel Securities, a global market-maker led by Ken Griffin, is speculated to have traded some of their borrowed $BTC against $UST with @LFG_org through @GenesisTrading. That could have been in preparation for the dump
The $UST de-peg is coincidentally happening at same time that the Fed released its Financial Stability report which included a section about the risk of bank runs on stablecoins
Keep in mind that all of that is mostly speculations at that stage. And while it has done a lot of damage to Terra, I've explained here why I stay optimistic about the protocol
What's not speculation is the bright future of the #Cosmos ecosystem, which I'm usually covering through educative & digestible threads on governance, airdrops, tokens, teams & projects, so you may consider re-tweeting this & giving me a follow @ThyBorg_βοΈ
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A death spiral isn't the most likely scenario for $UST. Looking at the design of the Terra protocol and the economic incentives at play, the odds are $UST recovers. The why & how in this thread π§΅
The Terra protocol is valuable for two reasons:
- it controls the supply of the nΒ°1 decentralised stablecoin
- it's an interoperable smart-contract blockchain built on Cosmos
While the trust in the stablecoin is at an all-time low, the Terra blockchain continues to host some of the best decentralised applications DeFi has to offer e.g @mars_protocol, @@astroport_fi, @TeamKujira etc.
Since $UST is the de-facto stablecoin of the #Cosmos ecosystem, I thought it'd be interesting to sum up the intense story of yesterday's de-pegging sequence π§΅
It started Saturday afternoon on the East Coast with significant withdrawals from the Anchor protocol
In an effort to promote the good actors of the ecosystem, I'm planning to publish a couple of threads per week on the most active community validators, starting today with fellow Frenchmen @imperator_co π§΅
Note that @imperator_co is the first validator to be listed on the new "Thyborg Cosmos Validator Ranking" available below. Imperator nominated @crypto_crew next, so I'll try to set up an interview with them, and the list will slowly grow that way cosmosvalidators.org
With 4 engineers, Imperator is a significant code contributor within the ecosystem validators. Their biggest achievement is clearly the website info.osmosis.zone and its widely used API (e.g by Dexmos & CitadelOne). Imperator is also an IBC relayer
If youβre new to #Cosmos (like me), you might be surprised about the intensity of the public debate. Since it is quite useful to understand the current dispute between important ecosystem actors, here's a neutral account of some prior events π§΅
Let's start from the beginning, as it was told by @buchmanster told @Cryptocito : when the two met, @jaekwon had already started researching proof-of-work consensus algorithms in the classical literature. That was before Ethereum.
Jae was the first to work on a byzantine-fault tolerant algorithm in the blockchain space. In 2014, Ethan & Jae created a company called Tendermint, who later organised the a public token sale for $ATOM, raising 17 million in 2017.
#Prop69 is getting everyone talking about CosmWasm so I thought it would be useful to explain what it is (while careful ignoring the hot debate around its implementation in the Cosmos Hub) π§΅
Unlike virtual-machine blockchains (like Ethereum) where everything is programmed as a set of smart contracts, the Cosmos SDK is a framework for application-specific blockchains
The framework is designed to build blockchains out of composable modules. Anyone can create a module, and integrating already-built modules is straightforward