Levine had a pretty cool/funny story today. If you vaguely remember the words “Wormhole hack”, Wormhole is a bridge between the Ethereum and Solana blockchains that got hacked for a fuckton of money ($300M) last year. And the blockchain being the blockchain, the places where that money went is totally traceable, and eventually the thieves put it into some highly-leveraged DeFi positions, at which point they had apparently stopped thinking like exploiters because this happened next:
complete wtf at stealing 300M and thinking hmm really need to do some more leveraged trading. Wonder if somehow they were hoping this could help launder it more effectively or something?
Circle, which founded USDC in 2018 with Coinbase, revealed Friday that $3.3 billion of its reserves behind its flagship stablecoin were stuck with the failed Silicon Valley Bank. The news triggered a sharp decline in USDC, which is meant to stay pegged one-to-one to the U.S. dollar.
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USDC lost its peg to the U.S. dollar overnight, dropping as low as $0.88 following the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank. The crypto market was frustrated with Circle over a lack of transparency surrounding its exposure to the bank, which it eventually confirmed as being $3.3 billion.
USDC currently at $0.97. Kinda funny for a traditional finance problem to become a crypto problem instead of the other way around.
