3AC: A $10B hedge fund gone bust with founders on the run
Three Arrow Capital (3AC), a Singapore-based crypto hedge fund that at one point managed over $10 billion worth of assets, became one of the many crypto firms that went bankrupt in this bear market.
However, the fall of 3AC wasn’t purely a market-driven phenomenon. As more information surfaced, the collapse looked more like a self-inflicted crisis brought upon by an unchecked decision-making process.
To put it concisely, the hedge fund made a series of large directional trades in Grayscale Bitcoin Trust (GBTC), Luna Classic (LUNC) and Staked Ether (stETH) and borrowed funds from over 20 large institutions. The May crypto crash led to a series of spiral investment collapse for the hedge fund. The firm went bust and the loan defaults have led to mass contagion in crypto.
The first hints of possible insolvency occurred in June with a cryptic tweet from the co-founder Zhu Su in the wake of the movement of 3AC funds. The crypto market crash led to a severe decline in the prices of top cryptocurrencies including Ether (ETH), which led to a series of liquidations for the hedge fund.
3AC exchanged roughly $500 million worth of Bitcoin (BTC) with the Luna Foundation Guard for the equivalent fiat amount in LUNC just weeks before Terra imploded.
The rumors ramped up after Zhu removed all mention of investments in ETH, Avalanche (AVAX), LUNC, Solana (SOL), Near Protocol (NEAR), Mina (MINA), decentralized finance (DeFi) and nonfungible tokens (NFTs) from his Twitter bio, keeping only a mention of Bitcoin (BTC).
The series of liquidations for 3AC had a catastrophic impact on crypto lenders such as BlockFi, Voyager and Celsius. Many of the crypto lenders had to eventually file for bankruptcy themselves due to exposure to 3AC.
Sam Callahan,
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