On May 3, an unidentified address burned 405 million TUSD (405,773,550 USD), representing 16.2% of the stablecoin’s $2.51 billion dollar supply. The transactions came from Binance's hot wallet and the 'black hole' address in four batches totaling $230m TUSD and eight transactions totaling $175.5m TUSD, respectively. These mysterious transactions were met with suspicion as some were quick to suspect potential manipulation in the cryptocurrency realm.

Such suspicious activities would be in line with prevailing theories as to why such an amount of TUSD was destroyed. One Reddit user suggests that it is possible that unbacked stablecoins were created and used to purchase other cryptocurrencies, inflating their prices temporarily with the subsequent burning of these coins being completed in order to cover the tracks.

Notable exchanges such as Binance reportedly allowed users to stake TrueUSD (TUSD) or Binance Coin (BNB) in efforts to take part in the initial distribution of the Sui (SUI) Network, a blockchain project created by former Meta engineers. This launch is believed to have set the scene for the burning incident.

The tweet above, posted by a critiquing account, points to Binance CEO, Changpeng “CZ” Zhao as the one behind the transactions. Allegations are that CZ exchanged 500 million TUSD with the USDT stablecoin in order to capitalize on the SUI hype, but when it came to depositing dollars, he burned the tokens instead.

TrueUSD has yet to release a statement concerning this incident. Regardless, the burning of such a large volume of a stablecoin has raised many questions concerning the potential for manipulation within the cryptocurrency market and its mainly low-cap tokens.



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