The Block's research director analysis: Trading institution Jump attempts to defend UST, but even after spending at least $700 million, they are unable to turn the tide.

Wall Street quantitative trading firm Jump Trading has a subsidiary called Jump Crypto specifically dedicated to cryptocurrency trading. In March of this year, it participated in a $1 billion funding round led by the LFG Foundation along with several venture capital firms, becoming a major investor in Terra. Igor Igamberdiev, research director at The Block, analyzed that Jump Crypto attempted to rescue UST but ran out of options after spending nearly $700 million.

In the past, Jump Trading also assisted in recovering a $325 million loss from the cross-chain bridge Wormhole, but unfortunately, they were unable to replicate their success this time.

Jump loses billions and spirals into death

Igor Igamberdiev stated that Jump Crypto spent at least 6.825 billion different stablecoins through at least three Ethereum addresses to defend against the UST detachment issue.

Fill the burning Curve 3pool

Jump Crypto had added one-sided liquidity of USDC to the already massively imbalanced Curve 3pool: DAI/USDC/USDT, along with other stablecoins, totaling at least $6.825 billion.

Withdraw UST from Curve 3pool

They withdrew up to 5.93 billion UST from the Curve 3pool, which should have worked, but with a substantial liquidity of $12 billion still present, the UST price quickly began to decline.

No immediate switch to LUNA arbitrage

Until 5/9, Jump Crypto did not even exchange back to LUNA on the official platform despite acquiring a large amount of UST for arbitrage. It was not until 5/11 that they exchanged 7.456 UST for a large amount of LUNA.

Exit Anchor liquidity and delegate LUNA to validation nodes

Jump Crypto also exited liquidity from Anchor and obtained 1.6 million bLUNA. On 5/12, they converted 6.4 billion UST into 2.21 billion LUNA. The received LUNA was distributed to five major validation nodes for staking: Orion Money, Hashed, DSRV, Everstake, SmartStake.

Conclusion

Igor Igamberdiev stated that even with the nearly equivalent amount of funds used at the time, it seems that it was not possible to save the detachment. Jump lost billions of dollars, not including their operations on centralized exchanges. They might be one of the biggest victims, as they hold 36% of the LUNA staking amount. As of the deadline, Jump has not responded to Igor Igamberdiev's analysis.