Both of Justin Sun’s stablecoins, one of which Protos has previously reported on, are struggling to maintain their promised $1.00 peg.

At the time of writing, USDD is hovering around $0.97, and USDJ is trading at $1.09. Curiously, this means that one of Sun’s stablecoins is melting down while the other is melting up.

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Silvergate marketed itself as a crypto-friendly banking services provider but, unsurprisingly, it ended up providing financial services to firms that were once the world’s second-largest crypto exchange and market-maker: FTX and Alameda Research.

As the world discovers the reality behind Silvergate’s business, investors have progressively sold off shares as they dropped from their $238 November 2021 heights to under $13 today. Not only that, even Senators are probing Silvergate regarding inappropriate transfers of FTX customer funds into Sam Bankman-Fried’s trading fund, Alameda.

With Silvergate's reckoning still playing out, here is a timeline of events that led up to and hastened the company's collapse.

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The New York Attorney General (NYAG) has brought a suit against Alex Mashinsky, formerly CEO of the now-bankrupt Celsius Network, for securities fraud, failure to register, repeated and persistent fraud, and repeated and persistent illegality.

In the complaint, the NYAG alleges a variety of misrepresentations that Mashinsky made. Here is a summary of the specific misrepresentations they allege.

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Accurately accounting for Tether’s reserves is a challenge, even (or perhaps especially) for Tether itself. Twitter user Jay Pinho recently published a website that attempts to track the value of the assets backing Tether to gain some insight into their solvency. It also allows you to tweak the composition to see how that affects the performance.

However, due to Tether’s commitment to remaining as opaque as possible, accurately making this assessment can really only be done by someone with full access to its books.

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Binance has previously undercollateralized its stablecoin, BUSD, on its own blockchain, according to on-chain data revealing that the wallet backing the BUSD bridged from Ethereum’s blockchain onto Binance’s blockchain did not consistently equal one dollar’s worth of assets for each Binance-pegged BUSD.

Investigative reporter Jonathan Reiter of Data Finnovation collaborated with Patrick Tan of Novum Alpha to initially publicize the shortfall. Reiter has published five scholarly articles and specializes in stablecoin research. Both firms are based in Singapore. Their joint analysis shows insufficient backing of BUSD trading on BNB Chain for several months.

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Moonstone Bank chief legal officer Joseph Vincent, a former top banking regulator, has left the financial firm, after being with the bank for just eight months.

Vincent joined Moonstone, one of the smallest banks in the country, which gained national attention late last year for its ties to FTX, in May 2022. Moonstone heralded Vincent’s hire in a post on LinkedIn. “We are delighted to share this exciting news,” Moonstone wrote.

Prior to joining Moonstone, Vincent spent 18 years as a top official in Washington’s Department of Financial Institutions, which is the state’s banking regulator. Vincent is also an adjunct legal professor at Seattle University School of Law, according to the school’s website.

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In a text message to Reuters, Huobi’s advisor Justin Sun confirmed that the crypto exchange plans to dismiss 20% of its employees this quarter.

“The planned layoff ratio is about 20%, but it is not implemented now. With the current state of the bear market, a very lean team will be maintained going forward,” a Huobi spokesperson told The Block.

Tron founder Sun sits on Huobi’s global advisory board. For the past few days, he’s been battling rumours of Huobi’s insolvency on Twitter. 

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Tate’s a pretty popular guy in the crypto world. In addition to having many fans in the space, he’s been interviewed – and in some cases even defended -- by various popular influencers, including Anthony Pompliano and Laya Heilpern.

But, for those who haven’t had the dubious pleasure of coming across him already, Tate is a former world champion kickboxer and now online influencer who’s amassed millions of fans and followers by claiming to teach young men how to “stop being losers.”

Known for peddling online courses that promise to show how to ‘escape the Matrix,’ the cigar-smoking supercar enthusiast also has a history of shilling crypto.

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A growing number of associates of former billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried are choosing to cooperate with authorities, who are working to prosecute the FTX co-founder for a slew of criminal fraud charges.

Last month, former Alameda Research chief Caroline Ellison pleaded guilty to defrauding investors. She agreed to cooperate fully with investigators, which spelled bad news for Bankman-Fried. He pleaded not guilty to a series of fraud charges on Tuesday. 

Now, reports indicate that FTX’s former top lawyer Daniel Friedberg has been cooperating for months.

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Larry Summers, the Harvard professor and former top financial advisor during the Obama administration, has cut ties with troubled crypto conglomerate Digital Currency Group (DCG). 

Summers joined DCG as a senior advisor in 2016, a year after DCG was formed. It’s not clear when Summers resigned his role -- through a spokesperson, Summers told Protos he left DCG several months ago.

However, the former US Secretary of the Treasury was listed on DCG’s website as a member of the company’s advisory board as recently as November. That information has since been removed from DCG’s website.

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