The U.S. SEC’s legal action against Do Kwon and his company Terraform Labs may hinge on the role of market maker Jump Trading, according to court documents filed on Wednesday.
In May 2022, Do Kwon’s TerraUSD stablecoin (UST) collapsed, and he was subsequently sued by the SEC for misleading investors. New filings in the case show that the role of market maker Jump, which appears to have made a $1.28 billion profit when UST collapsed, has come under scrutiny.
At the time, UST was temporarily decoupled from the U.S. dollar, and while Kwon told investors that UST maintained a value of $1 due to its automated algorithms, SEC experts said this was because Jump intervened in the market at Terraform’s behest.
The Do Kwon defense team stated that the defendant denies the allegations and claims that Jump’s UST transaction was not the cause of the resumption of UST’s peg in May 2021. The document added: “The de-anchoring of UST in May 2022 was the result of deliberate ‘shorting’ by third parties and involved direct public intervention to combat short selling.”
Additionally, its defense team argued that the SEC had no jurisdiction because the assets involved were currencies, not securities. (CoinDesk)