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The Almighty Buck

Users Threaten To Sue After Yield Generation Project Stablegains Loses $44 Million in Terra Collapse (web3isgoinggreat.com) 52

A class action law firm sent a letter to the yield generation project Stablegains, demanding records on customer accounts, marketing and advertising strategies, and communications relating to the Terra stablecoin. Web3 is Going Great reports: [...] Unfortunately for their customers, it turned out that Stablegains was heavily invested in the Terra project's Anchor protocol, which collapsed along with the rest of the Terra ecosystem last week. Stablegains' website had stated they primarily generated yields through the asset-backed stablecoin USDC. However, after the collapse of Terra, Stablegains admitted that "All users' holdings are in UST" -- which lost over 90% of its value. Stablegains was part of Y Combinator's W22 batch and had received over $3 million in funding from several venture capital firms, including SNO Ventures, Moonfire and Goodwater Capital.
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Users Threaten To Sue After Yield Generation Project Stablegains Loses $44 Million in Terra Collapse

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  • In other words (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Chelloveck ( 14643 ) on Friday May 20, 2022 @09:42AM (#62552088)
    Fools and their money parted, film at 11.
    • by NFN_NLN ( 633283 )

      How much is admission to this film? Never mind, name your price, sir.

      • by MightyMartian ( 840721 ) on Friday May 20, 2022 @10:58AM (#62552292) Journal

        Well, we haven't actually made it yet. For a mere investment of $250,000 you can be one of a eighty three investors who get credit as a producer, and when we win the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Animated Projectile Vomit Film, all of you can scramble on stage and get half a second to thank your mother, your wife, your mistress and the guy that cleans your gutters.

        Unless I run off to Panama with the cash and send you a VHS cassette of a 1980s Mexican telenovela dubbed into Manchurian.

      • by noodler ( 724788 )

        How much is admission to this film? Never mind, name your price, sir.

        Dear sir NFN_NLN,

        Please pardon my boldness of taking up some of your valuable time.

        Browsing on this forums I have noticed your keen sight on financial opportunities and your impeccable reputation in this community.
        I have today a chance deal for you.
        This is a very special deal so you could call yourself lucky. It could be the very best opportunity that you have seen in the past year, maybe even your life!

        You see, Sir, I have a bridge for sale...

    • From their website:

      Please note: Stablegains is not accepting new customers at the moment.

      Y Combinator is one of their backers [ycombinator.com] too.

    • My first thought exactly.
    • I was thinking more along the lines, "A sucker is born every minute."

    • Not in this case. The company said client funds were placed in one thing but were placed in a completely different thing. That is fraud by the company. It's as If you bought shares of Homedepot on etrade and think you hold Home depot but in reality etrade bought Lowes shares with your money without telling you. Someone should go to jail for this.
      • > Not in this case. ... Someone should go to jail for this.

        Sure, they probably should go to jail. They won't, since they are in Panama or Belarus or whatever, but they should.

        That does NOT mean that "a fool and his money" doesn't apply!
        Sure, it was a fraud, just like the other crypto scams we see posted here EVERY SINGLE DAY.

        When you see it every day, when you're told hundreds of time about these scams, at some point intelligent people stop sending their money to Nigerian princes. Yeah that crap you got

      • by SirSlud ( 67381 )

        If you buy shares from some dude in a back alley, that can be both fraud AND a fool parting with his money. They're not always mutually exclusive.

    • Thanks. I read the title, and the summary, and the entire thing appeared to be gibberish typed out by a team of drunk monkeys.

    • by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Indeed. "Stablegains", my ass. Whenever you think something is too stupid for people to fall for it, they prove you wrong.

  • by Burdell ( 228580 ) on Friday May 20, 2022 @09:45AM (#62552102)

    The money is gone, there's nothing to make them whole. I guess the project could replace their fake money with other fake money...

  • by Virtucon ( 127420 ) on Friday May 20, 2022 @09:48AM (#62552108)

    It's a minor point but "threaten to sue" and having a class action lawsuit filed are in opposition to each other.

    • Here's a better article with more details. [cointelegraph.com]

      “You owe an ‘uncompromising duty to preserve’ any evidence you know or reasonably should know will be relevant evidence in a pending lawsuit,” the letter said, adding “failure to comply [] may result in civil or criminal penalties.”

      Lawyerspeak for "you're fucked, we just want to know how much your carcass is worth."

      • Lawyer speak for "we think that somewhere you have in your files evidence that you deliberately cheated us, and we intend to fish through your files to find it."

      • Re:Better Article (Score:5, Informative)

        by ZiggyZiggyZig ( 5490070 ) on Friday May 20, 2022 @10:05AM (#62552150)

        Also this quote :

        Pantera Capital an early investor in Terra revealed that it had cashed out around 80% of its LUNA investment with the firm turning $1.7 million into around $170 million, according to partner Paul Veradittakit.

        Early investors racking in huge profits (that's 100x!), later investors taking huge losses when the scheme bursts, typical Ponzi stuff...

        Reading the whole article gave me a headache. Coins backed by other coins backed by other coins... All imaginary money, except from the final idiots who gave in the real dollars just in time for the earlier investors to cash out.

        • If this was a Ponzi scheme (as opposed to just a bad investment that got overpriced), there are provisions for "claw backs" where the original "investors" would have to repay profits. This legal mechanism exists to discourage investing in Ponzi schemes. Being an "early winner" is no longer being a winner, because you have to return the gains. It will be interesting to see if this is actually a Ponzi scheme or just general stupidity
        • by HiThere ( 15173 )

          What you're missing is that "real dollars" is also imaginary money.

          Basically money is just an accounting system, and trust in the money is trust that the accountants are hones. With fiat currencies there's the added feature of "we will periodically demand that you pay us some of the currency or we'll take your stuff or do other nasty things to you", and that's what give any of it any value, even though it's known and demonstrated that the accountants are not honest.

          • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

            by Brain-Fu ( 1274756 )

            The value of fiat currency comes from the reliability of the government backing it, not from the necessity of taxation.

          • What you're missing is that "real dollars" is also imaginary money.

            Oh, horseshit. Maybe in an irredeemably abstract way, but false any other way you look at it. To believe that in any tangible way you'd have to ignore the world around you.

            I just arrived home with tonight's dinner. Carrots, peppers, zucchini, eggplant, cauliflower, asparagus... all to be charcoal smoked in my new komodo-style grill. Guess what every part of that chain was purchased with? Grill... charcoal... mesquite chips... vegetables... t

            • by HiThere ( 15173 )

              Many transactions denominated in dollars never actually involve actual dollars. E.g. banks depend on loaning out more money than they have reserves to cover. So whenever you use your credit card, you aren't using actual dollars, but rather "virtual dollars" (on the analogy of virtual particles, but without the honest bookkeeping). Yes, you can exchange those "virtual dollars" for real merchandise, but only because the merchant ALSO needs to be able to pay taxes.

              If you'd prefer the term "virtual dollars"

              • Maybe I misinterpreted your point. I apologize. Virtual dollars is a much better term.

                In fact, I would suggest virtual dollars are preferable for people who aren't terribly concerned about privacy in their day to day life. Physical, paper dollars are more easily damaged, are more prone to being lost or left somewhere out of reach, and carry all the same risks of devaluation that virtual ones carry.

                However... if I'm buying cocaine, or paying for a night in a hotel with my mistress, cash is still king.

        • Coins backed by other coins backed by other coins... All imaginary money, except from the final idiots who gave in the real dollars just in time for the earlier investors to cash out.

          That's essentially what this article says [cnn.com]. Or at least one of the people in the article:

          Algorithmic coins are "just a fancy way of saying, 'We are going to say that this is worth a dollar because it's backed by another asset that we also create out of thin air,'" says Charles Cascarilla, the chief executive and co-founder of Paxos, a blockchain infrastructure firm.

  • by SciCom Luke ( 2739317 ) on Friday May 20, 2022 @10:13AM (#62552176)
    I know the American national sport is suing each other, but this is not going to get the money back, and not going to help anybody.

    You gambled.
    You lost.
    Deal with it.
    Would they also sue casinos when they lose money there?
    I would like to see how that works out.
    • by NFN_NLN ( 633283 )

      > Would they also sue casinos when they lose money there?

      Lost or cheated out of...

      https://money.cnn.com/2017/06/... [cnn.com]

    • .. not going to help anybody.

      Won't someone please think of the lawyers!

      -those bastards

    • Without suing there's little to no chance of criminal penalties. The lawsuit grabs paperwork, which can become evidence, or it gets destroyed, which is in itself possibly a crime. There are not hordes of criminal lawyers out there investigating everything, so in the US most enforcement does come sideways through lawsuits. If no one ever sues, then there's no incentive not to defraud.

    • I know the American national sport is suing each other, but this is not going to get the money back, and not going to help anybody.
      You gambled.
      You lost.
      Deal with it.
      Would they also sue casinos when they lose money there?
      I would like to see how that works out.

      Where are you coming from?

      One one hand, we wouldn't have market or gaming regulations if people didn't sue all the time about them. It's probably the only thing that will get the crypto markets properly regulated because until then, lawmakers should take a wait and see approach to let it grow. I still think they're bad gamblers, but they absolutely should be suing left and right.

      On the other hand, someone profiting from crypto being the Wild West would also take this attitude. I don't care if all the vic

    • by noodler ( 724788 ) on Friday May 20, 2022 @12:51PM (#62552636)

      Would they also sue casinos when they lose money there?

      No, because a casino tells you the odds and if you have more than 2 brain cells you know you will never win in the long run.
      On the other hand, these scumbags misrepresented, in writing, the risks they were offering.
      That's pretty much the same thing as financial fraud.

    • Oh it will help someone. The lawyers.

      They won't file a single word of paperwork without a nice fat retainer.

  • Cryptocurrencies are so awesome! DeFi FTW!

    Why aren't more people throwing their money at this??? It's the absolute best way of winning a bit of economic equality for the whole world!

    Invest now or be left behind.

    • Diamond hands

    • The lingo here is just so awesome, and inscrutable. It means what you want it to mean. "Yield generation app", this is clearly an agricultural product; grow more plants from your phone! "Stablegains" means I was wrong, this is about high yield of racing horse semen. "Terra stablecoin", well, they're applying cryptocurrency to the buying and trading of race horses? I guess to each their own. "Y Combinator's W22 batch", yup, clearly this is a focus on the Y chromosome fraction of a particular collected b

  • Suck shit.
  • Specifically one caused by our government in order to force inflation down. We could of course do a whole bunch of things involving infrastructure spending and taxing the rich instead of causing a recession to control inflation but we're not going to do that because we're stupid.

    Anyway when the recession hits everyone's going to try and pull their money out of the Bitcoin market at once and it's going to crash hard. In particular tether is very precarious and the whole market is built off it.

    Hopeful
    • History teaches us that we do not learn from history.

      Personally, I would like to see a removal of some of the loopholes that the rich use to legally avoid paying taxes. Overt tax increases on the rich actually wind up targeting the middle class and making it even harder for members thereof to move in any direction but downwards. Worse yet, removal of tax incentives that benefit the middle or lower classes, in the name of taxing the rich, are entirely self-defeating.

      One example is the threatened removal of

    • by noodler ( 724788 )

      Specifically one caused by our government in order to force inflation down.

      Could you explain the mechanism by which the government causes a recession and how this recession would reduce inflation?

    • Specifically one caused by our government in order to force inflation down. We could of course do a whole bunch of things involving infrastructure spending and taxing the rich instead of causing a recession to control inflation but we're not going to do that because we're stupid.

      There will be a recession sooner or later. A controlled one is better than one that comes in a crash. Okay, let me mix my metaphors a bit. If a dam about to overflow, it's better for the operator to release some of the water in advance, rather than letting the dam just burst.

  • So the people who put money into the scam because they wanted free money, are now threatening to put money into a lawsuit to try and get their free money? I guess it's "keep putting money in until we get our free money" all the way down.

The truth of a proposition has nothing to do with its credibility. And vice versa.

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