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According to a recently published report by smart money crypto tracker Lookonchain, a mysterious fund has moved 322 million units of dollar-pegged stablecoin USDC to crypto exchanges in two portions.
The series of events that followed this has drawn the aforementioned tracker's attention as it involved the liquidation of over $240 million in crypto.
Ethereum plunges on Silvergate news
Lookonchain reminded the community about yesterday's crash of crypto-friendly bank Silvergate's share price, and that it caused a plunge in the crypto market led by the two largest coins: Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH).
Ethereum faced a drop of around 5%, falling from the $1,642 to the $1,553 level. Bitcoin nosedived by 6%, losing about $1,000 within one hour. That was a two-week low for BTC.
However, before ETH plummeted, its price saw a slight rise. This is where the "mysterious fund" mentioned by Lookoonchain steps in.
Mysterious fund moves bags of USDC to exchanges
Before ETH printed a huge red candle on the hourly chart, it saw a minor increase by almost 2%. At this point, an unknown fund withdrew 312 million USDC tokens from Circle that issues them and moved those hundreds of millions of stablecoins to various exchanges during the eight hours while the price uptick lasted.
During the time in which Ethereum rose, a few things happened. First, Coinbase posted a tweet that it stopped accepting or initiating payments with the aforementioned Silvergate crypto-friendly bank.
An hour later, the anonymous fund mentioned above began moving USDC from Circle and sending the crypto to digital exchanges.
2/ #Coinbase tweeted that it would no longer accept or initiate payments with #Silvergate 14 hrs ago.
— Lookonchain (@lookonchain) March 3, 2023
13 hrs ago, the fund started to withdraw $USDC from #Circle and transfer to exchanges, then stop 5 hrs ago.
The price of $ETH has increased by 2% during this period. pic.twitter.com/PsUeJBGBRX
$240 million in crypto wiped out
Forty minutes before the Lookonchain tweet came out, the fund again made a withdrawal of 10 million USDC from Circle and pushed it over to crypto exchanges. Lookonchain stressed that "according to the data on chain, the behavior of this mysterious fund is very strange."
4/ In the past 4 hours, $210M in assets were liquidated as the crypto market plummeted.
— Lookonchain (@lookonchain) March 3, 2023
Does this have something to do with this fund? pic.twitter.com/sdi018NZgX
Then, during the four hours that preceded the tweet, a total of $210 million worth of cryptocurrencies was liquidated. Lookonchain wonders if this liquidation has anything to do with the USDC movements of the aforementioned fund but does not provide any answers or even guesses.
Valeria Blokhina
Vladislav Sopov
Alex Dovbnya
