Telegram group at center of Jane Street insider-trading allegations in Terra collapse

Jane Street Group, one of Wall Street’s largest trading firms, allegedly used a private Telegram backchannel with Terraform Labs insiders to dump $192 million of the doomed TerraUSD (UST) stablecoin before its collapse in May 2022, according to newly unsealed court filings in Manhattan federal court.

The complaint, brought by the administrator winding down Terraform’s bankruptcy estate, was amended last week with fewer redactions, revealing new details about how Jane Street allegedly obtained non-public information as Terra’s ecosystem unraveled.

Jane Street denied the initial allegations, filed in February, as "desperate" and "baseless" and asked the court to dismiss the case.

According to the complaint, Jane Street’s edge allegedly came through a private Telegram backchannel between former Terraform intern Bryce Pratt, then working at Jane Street, and his former colleagues inside Terraform.

The estate says that access helped Jane Street dump the UST position near par before the algorithmic stablecoin collapsed, then build short positions that generated roughly $134 million as Terra’s $40 billion ecosystem unraveled.

In one internal exchange cited in the complaint, Pratt is said to have joked that colleagues should be “slightly pleased” about having an “informational advantage.”

Armed with that edge, Jane Street allegedly sold its entire UST position on May 7, 2022, exiting roughly 193 million tokens. Its largest trade, an $85 million UST sale on decentralized exchange Curve Finance, came just nine minutes after Terraform quietly withdrew $150 million of UST liquidity from the same pool.

That trade matters because public postmortems of Terra’s collapse had long focused on a large Curve swap that helped push the token off its $1 peg. The lawsuit now alleges that the wallet belonged to Jane Street.

When a crypto analytics firm later told a Jane Street contact the firm had "made a killing," internal communications cited by the case show traders worrying about how their wallets had been identified, then discussing how to "decommission" them.

“This suit is a transparent attempt to extract money when it is well-established that the losses suffered by Terra and Luna holders were the result of a multi-billion dollar fraud perpetrated by the management of Terraform Labs," a Jane Street spokesperson said. "As demonstrated in the motion to dismiss filed in court last month, we will defend ourselves vigorously against these baseless, opportunistic claims.”

The suit also names Jane Street co-founder Robert Granieri and trader Michael Huang. It alleges violations of federal securities laws and the Commodity Exchange Act, and seeks disgorgement of profits to pay back creditors.

A 2023 federal court ruling in a separate Securities and Exchange Commission case found that UST and Luna qualified as securities, a finding that strengthens the new complaint's legal footing.

On May 18, 2022, five days after UST hit bottom, Jane Street offered Terraform's head of research a job, the complaint says. He started two weeks later.