The question of whether FTX was involved in the Luna/UST depeg and crash in May 2022 is a complex one, with no definitive proof but plenty of speculation and some circumstantial evidence floating around.
Here’s what we know: The Terra ecosystem, with its algorithmic stablecoin UST and native token Luna, collapsed spectacularly when UST lost its $1 peg, triggering a death spiral that wiped out around $40 billion in market value. This started around May 7, 2022, when massive sell-offs of UST—over $2 billion unstaked from the Anchor Protocol—kicked off a panic. Luna’s price tanked from $80 to fractions of a cent as the system’s mint-and-burn mechanism failed under pressure.
Now, where does FTX fit in? After FTX’s own collapse in November 2022, U.S. prosecutors reportedly started looking into whether Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF), FTX’s founder, and his hedge fund Alameda Research might have played a role in Terra’s downfall. The theory is that they could have manipulated markets to profit from the crash, possibly through shorting Luna or orchestrating trades that destabilized UST. Some on-chain whispers—like claims from crypto analysts on X—suggest FTX and Alameda pulled large amounts of UST from liquidity pools (e.g., $200 million each with Celsius) at a vulnerable moment, potentially accelerating the depeg. Do Kwon, Terra’s founder, even pointed fingers, alleging Alameda sold 500 million UST in February 2021 to drain Curve pools and later shorted Bitcoin to weaken Luna Foundation Guard’s reserves during the May crash.
But here’s the rub: there’s no smoking gun. Investigations were in early stages as of late 2022, and no conclusive findings have pinned FTX as the mastermind. Blockchain analytics like Nansen’s May 2022 report argue the depeg wasn’t a single-player attack but a cascade of events—big swaps on-chain (e.g., 85 million UST for USDC on May 7) and poor liquidity on centralized exchanges like Binance and FTX.
