Less than one month after its official release, Arkham Intelligence's Intel-to-Earn blockchain platform has produced its first results. The inaugural bounty uncovered $160 million of undisclosed assets from a wallet connected with Terraform Labs, a revelation that could make matters substantially worse for the company behind perhaps the greatest stablecoin fiasco yet.
The crash of the Terra/Luna ecosystem in May 2022 was the first domino in a chain that quickly sent the crypto world to its harshest winter, one that it is still trying to recover from. Terralabs let its Terra stablecoin (UST) lose its peg to the dollar, which, if all else failed, should have been maintained by selling Bitcoin reserves to purchase UST off the market and maintain the currency’s value.
The company claimed to be unable to fulfil its duty after having exhausted all its Bitcoin reserves, leading the currency to crash and wiping out $40 billion worth of assets.
Now however, a different side of the story seems to have been uncovered. Through the newly created platform, a user set up a bounty requesting “evidence of wallets owned by Do Kwon/Terraform labs” for 9,519 thousand ARKM tokens (roughly $5,000 at the time) that was picked up by two sleuths (blockchain detectives).
What they discovered included 5,200 BTC (roughly $150 million at the time of writing) spread across several different wallets.
This discovery contradicts the South Korean company’s previous claims of owning just 313 BTC in reserves. It also worsens the legal case against its CEO, Do Kwon, who was arrested in Montenegro in June for using forged passports and is being charged in the U.S. with a multibillion-dollar fraud.
Further information about the account will be known in 90 days, the time it takes for privately requested data to be publicly exposed on the new information blockchain. The time-bound exclusivity is a fundamental aspect of the Arkham platform, serving as an incentive for users to pay for crypto-detectives’ services, which in time will allow them to finance “the ultimate decentralization of the community,”.
Arkham Intelligence was met with some skepticism upon its release last month. Claiming to increase transparency in blockchain, the project endangers the anonymity and privacy principles that motivated people to invest in decentralized currencies in the first place.
Uncovering the dirty secrets of one of the bad guys of crypto is an important first win for Arkham Intelligence. All eyes are now on the platform, Observing where it goes next.