On Friday afternoon, HTX board member Justin Sun undertook a mass printing of the little-used stablecoin TUSD, a move that caught the attention of traders as over $815 million entered circulation in less than 15 minutes.
Starting at 11:45 am ET, data from Tronscan shows that $815 million TUSD was minted directly to the Tron blockchain across a series of 10 transactions. Each of the mints was to a new address, which then immediately sent funds to the Huobi 2 hot wallet.
Prior to these transactions, the last TUSD mint to Tron was seven days ago.
Shortly after these deposits, a series of nine transactions from the Huobi 2 address sent TUSD totaling roughly $815 million to a well-known and closely-watched address managed by Justin Sun.
The funds were then sent to an unlabeled contract whose code refers to it as “minterproxy.” Minterproxy then sent $865 million in TUSD to another address, which in turn burned the tokens.
However, the TUSD burns happen to align almost perfectly with mints of stUSDT. Across 10 transactions, $865 million stUSDT were minted to Sun’s address. Sun then deposited the stUSDT to Tron-based lending platform JustLend over a series of six transactions.
The deposits today now account for half of Sun’s $1.5 billion JustLend position, per Tronscan.
StUSDT is a staked USDT product that currently yields 4.2%, with claims that the yield comes from real-world assets (RWAs). According to the stUSDT website, which Blockworks viewed via a proxy as United States IP addresses are geofenced, the yield is generated via “high-grade short-term government bonds.”
Per DeFiLlama data, JustLend’s total value locked (TVL) increased 17% to $4.63 billion following the deposits.
In a recent statement to CryptoSlate, a Tether spokesperson said that stUSDT was “an independent project and is not affiliated with Tether.” Additionally, in July, TUSD parent company Archblocks co-founder accused Sun of acquiring TUSD through various shell companies.
Sun, who was charged with fraud and other securities laws violations by the SEC in March, said in a statement to Blockworks that the transactions were related to his personal fund and not Huobi business.
He added: “Printing! Moar!”
Get the day’s top crypto news and insights delivered to your email every evening. Subscribe to Blockworks’ free newsletter now.
Want alpha sent directly to your inbox? Get degen trade ideas, governance updates, token performance, can’t-miss tweets and more from Blockworks Research’s Daily Debrief.
Can’t wait? Get our news the fastest way possible. Join us on Telegram and follow us on Google News.
Source: https://blockworks.co/news/justin-sun-tusd-mint