Crypto hedge fund Three Arrows Capital (3AC) has bought more than half a billion dollars worth of Ether in the time since CEO Zhu Su publicly slammed the cryptocurrency on Twitter. Do the purchases mean he's changed his mind, or was he just taking advantage of a market crash to buy the dip?
In an anti-ETH tirade between Nov. 20 and Nov. 22, Zhu tweeted about why he had “abandoned Ethereum despite supporting it in the past.” The thread came in response to a tweet from Synthetix founder Kain Warwick, who’d called out people who have “sold out in pursuit of profit maximization.” During the tweet storm Zhu claimed that Ethereum culture “suffers massively from the Founders’ Dilemma” and that “everyone is already far too rich to remember what they originally set out to do.”
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However, after attracting wide attention, he made a U-turn saying he wanted to "soften" his original stance and that “I love Ethereum and what it stands for.”
In the 17 days or so since the threads, approximately 156,400 thousand Ether (ETH) or $676.37 million has been transferred to a wallet that blockchain analytics firm Nansen has associated with 3AC.
Almost all the funds entering the wallet during this period were transferred from Binance, FTX exchange or Coinbase.
Zhu confirmed the transactions earlier today in response to a tweet from Chinese blogger Wu Blockchain, saying that although Ethereum layer-one is still “unusable for newcomers,” he’d still “bid hard on any panic dump like this weekend.”
The wallet shows 3AC made the majority of its purchases during the weekend price crash.
When the anti-ETH tweets emerged, many Twitter users believed he was trying to pump rival project Avalanche (AVAX), which 3AC has invested in. In response to a user asking if the ETH purchases meant he'd dumped his AVAX holdings for ETH, he said that he has “never sold AVAX” and simply “bought this ETH from whoever was financially illiterate enough to sell this weekend.”
In early November, Three Arrows Capital was announced as an investor in Blizzard, a fund to promote the development of AVAX. Following Zhu’s initial tweets, AVAX pushed out Dogecoin (DOGE) from its spot as the 10th-largest crypto by market capitalization. Zhu tweeted a graph of AVAX’s growth captioned “top 10” in the hours before his U-turn.
Related: Three Arrows Capital executives launch NFT fund
At 23:34 UTC today, 93,791.894 Ether was moved from the wallet belonging to 3AC to an address that appears to belong to a major trader. Smaller amounts have been moved to other addresses, including 500 Ether moved to an apparent NFT investment wallet shortly.
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