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YC W22 Stablegains is being sued for losing $42M in funds from 4878 customers

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Re: YC W22 Stablegains is being sued for losing $42M in funds from 4878 customers

#271
post #171
post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IANAL, but anything between fraud and gross negligence I guess.

Fraud is very obvious. Which part of it is simply “gross negligence”?

When you pretend to be ignorant about parts of a crime that you haven't been proved to be involved with (although you built your entire business around the crime.) Between being charged with malice or stupidity, the wise man chooses stupidity.

Re: YC W22 Stablegains is being sued for losing $42M in funds from 4878 customers

#272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indirection seems to be very valuable with scams. The 2008 housing crash had a lot of layers: 1. Loan Application (Borrower Lying about income) 2. Mortgage Originator ( Not validating loan application ) 3. Mortgage Back Security Creators ( Obfuscate what is in the security ) 4. Ratings Agencies ( Not being honest that step 3 happened ) 5. Sellers of MBS ( Not being honest that steps 1-4 exist ) I don't know enough ab…

I'd swap 1) and 2). The people writing the mortgages were telling the borrowers to lie, and that the lies wouldn't be checked. It wasn't some oversight.

I understand, there were some cases where #1 didn't even exist, The person at #2 edited the application without #1 knowing. But the #1 situation happened as well, sometimes because a realtor told them that was the only way they would get the house.

Re: YC W22 Stablegains is being sued for losing $42M in funds from 4878 customers

#273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

its months and months worth of tweets, and that's all they talked about during this year. first a cryptic puzzle as a recruiting tool for analysts: https://twitter.com/Galois_Capital/status/148693793605468979... followed by months of warnings like this: https://twitter.com/Galois_Capital/status/151217543903232819... and threads pushing the systemic risk angle: https://twitter.com/Galois_Capital/status/150461116699529…

That chain in the first tweet should be enough to frighten anyone.

Until about 2/3 of the way through, I was convinced it was a parody.

Re: YC W22 Stablegains is being sued for losing $42M in funds from 4878 customers

#274
post #68

https://i.imgur.com/qz4EeQS.jpg - This is (was?) their ads "15% interest. No surprises."

And the YC board looked at this and funded it. That's unbelievable, isn't it?

Not unbelievable at all. I've pointed this out before, and I'll probably have cause to do so again, but Y Combinator has twice funded companies whose entire business model is smuggling:

https://techcrunch.com/2014/08/13/backpack-connects-you-with...

https://techcrunch.com/2016/01/28/shypmate-pays-travelers-to...

Re: YC W22 Stablegains is being sued for losing $42M in funds from 4878 customers

#275
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably not much else to invest on right at this moment, at least not at this level ("small" start-ups wanting to "change the world"). I was honestly believing that the web3 bullsh.t were just some young people who didn't know any better or some scam-artists (or both), I didn't actually think for a second that a "serious" VC like YC would put money into something like that. Looks like I was wrong.

Huh, my take all along was that web3 terminology was specifically designed to “pretty up” blockchain related things to make it palatable to VCs, by implying that it was going to be the next internet and you need to get on now.

This seems spot on to me. It's all just a tower of dumb greed in the end. Web3 is just stupid expensive P2P without a pure disruption model so they just ate it up

Re: YC W22 Stablegains is being sued for losing $42M in funds from 4878 customers

#276
post #266

Another negative story about a YC company which has risen to the front page of HN and then seems to be getting a lot of pressure to get ranked down. It has more points and is fresher then a handful of other stories on the frontpage but ranks lower and is falling quickly. And when mentioned in the past, the reason often is the invisible anti-flamewar or similar features. What is it this time? Elon needs to buy HN and…

> anti-flamewar This is a story about a company 1) in the crypto space, that 2) lost all of it's users money, and 3) used misleading disclaimers (and potentially trying to change them after the fact) It has already devolved in multiple threads to discussion about what is-and-is-not technically a ponzi scheme (vs other forms of scams/fraud). This whole thing is a recipe for a giant flame war.

To be fair, do you really expect a community as nerdy as this not to engage in pedantry about semantics? I would anticipate that in every discussion, inflammatory or not (I might even participate).

Re: YC W22 Stablegains is being sued for losing $42M in funds from 4878 customers

#278
post #171
post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IANAL, but anything between fraud and gross negligence I guess.

Fraud is very obvious. Which part of it is simply “gross negligence”?

Investing client cash in a scheme that promises to pay 20% yields with an explicitly ponzi like setup seems like gross negligence.

Terra and the Anchor protocol should have appeared fraudulent to any expert from the very start.

Re: YC W22 Stablegains is being sued for losing $42M in funds from 4878 customers

#279
post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So how is the 20% interest created? Excuse my ignorance on crypto. I don’t understand how UST can drop 90% when I assume it required some sort payment of some other currency/coins to get mint them. I heard it was tens billions of UST was minted. So what happened to these coins? Were they used to pay out the interest?

> So how is the 20% interest created? I'd treat the offer of earning 20% interest on a risk-free investment with the same scepticism I'd treat the offer of buying a perpetual motion machine. You can have abnormally high interest, or your capital can be risk-free. I simply don't believe it's possible to have both, at least not over the long term.

Interest has to come from somewhere. It is a zero sum game. There has to be some mechanism that is generating interest unless you're paying from the money invested which would qualify as a ponzi scheme

Re: YC W22 Stablegains is being sued for losing $42M in funds from 4878 customers

#280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hopefully they didn't park the investors' money in Anchor Protocol!

Tbh they very well may have. Didn’t think same kind of shit happen in the BTC crazy circa 2017?

It sounds like they were going all in with their customers' money, so it kind of makes sense for them to deposit investor money in UST as well. In the case of a depeg, they are screwed (since all of their customer money is gone) regardless of where they placed their capital. Might as well take full advantage..
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