Alameda Helping To Decentralize ICE
A Positive Spin on Alameda Dumping
If you’ve been involved in the DeFi yield farming space, you may have heard of Alameda. Alameda Research is a crypto quant trading firm owned by Sam Bankman Fried, the creator of FTX exchange and Solana ecosystem. Alameda has become notorious for its involvement in yield farming projects — and how they mercilessly dump farmed tokens and drive prices down. This has happened to a number of projects, and most recently to Iron Finance on Polygon network.
As is the nature of free markets, investors of all sizes are welcome to come and go as they please. Moreover, no one should be interested in blacklisting certain addresses as other projects have discussed more than once. Rather than seeing Alameda dumping farmed tokens as a disaster, it should be seen as an opportunity.
Was Alameda Behind The ICE Dump?
As you can see in the screenshot of the ICE chart above, two circled red candles coincide with Alameda dumping massive amounts of ICE tokens. Alameda was also a significant contributor to the rise and fall of Iron TVL, originally contributing nearly $1B and then withdrawing funds days later and bridging them back to Ethereum network.
Alameda’s wallet addresses are doxxed, and Apeboard shows their activity.
Positive Developments
It’s possible that Alameda’s investment into Iron could be a positive for the ecosystem in the long run for several reasons. First, their withdrawal of $1B from the IS3USD LP netted about $500k in revenue for the platform thanks to the .05% withdrawal fee which was immediately distributed to IronSwap LPs.
Additionally, their dumping of ICE tokens is allowing ICE to become far more decentralized at this early phase, and is enabling committed ICE investors to buy up cheap coins ahead of critical product launches such as the lending platform and Iron v2 stablecoin. Brighter days are ahead for ICE and this could be a great opportunity to scoop up and lock some cheap ICE tokens!
Lastly, Alameda’s willingness to deposit $1B in funds should give the platform some credibility. While many investors fear a “rug” after the bank run of Iron v1, would such a large organization deposit that much money without doing their own due diligence? Alameda typically deposits liquidity in quality projects and blue chips.