Three Arrows Wallet Mislabeled by Nansen, New Owner Revealed

A new finding suggests that a wallet labeled as belonging to 3AC actually belonged to a 3AC counterparty.

On-chain analytics firm Nansen, which had previously labeled the wallet as belonging to 3AC because funds from another known 3AC wallet had been moved there, admitted that it now belonged to Matrixport, a British Virgin Islands-based crypto financial services platform. Blockchain security firm Peckshield provided the initial information about the wallet address involved.

Yesterday, Be[In]Crypto reported that $33 million worth of staked ether had been removed from Curve’s liquidity pool into the wallet, then believed to belong to 3AC. Additionally, $4 million in wrapped ether, 200 bitcoin, and $4 million in stablecoin Tether were removed from Convex Finance.

Nansen proven unreliable

This was one occasion when Nansen’s labeling proved unreliable. It has since renamed the wallet as belonging to Matrixport. The company is a 3AC counterparty managing the wallet. It offers several DeFi services, including trading, staking, lending, and the ability to earn a yield on BTC, ETH, BCH, USDC, and USDT. It services miners, hedge funds, token funds, and asset managers. The company claims to process $50 million in daily trades for its clients, including mining company BitDeer and pricing site Coingecko.

It temporarily suspended ETH and ERC-20 token transactions for the Bellatrix upgrade, the first stage in the Ethereum Merge. The Merge aims to change the transaction validation mechanism from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake, saving 99.95% of the blockchain’s energy consumption.

Speculation abounded as to why 3AC would withdraw staked ETH when it was undergoing regulation. One theory was that it could borrow ETH against staked ETH to make itself eligible for the airdrop of a token from a fork of the Ethereum network, ETHPoW.

Another theory was that it could unwrap its wrapped ETH to make itself eligible for the airdrop, as Coingecko co-founder Bobby Ong recommended in a Twitter thread two days ago.

Three Arrows under liquidation

Three Arrows Capital filed for bankruptcy in July after it lost $200 million in the collapse of the TerraUSD stablecoin ecosystem. Creditors, including Genesis Global Trading, have filed claims of over $2.4 billion against the hedge fund that was ordered to undergo liquidation by a British Virgin Islands Court. A Singapore court recently granted the appointed liquidators access to 3AC’s financial records as part of the liquidation proceedings.

Liquidation company Teneo has remained mum about the asset withdrawals.

For Be[In]Crypto’s latest Bitcoin (BTC) analysis, click here.