HTX withdraws $570M from Aave, briefly spikes lending rates
Justin Sun-advised HTX appears to have withdrawn approximately $570 million worth of Tether (USDT) from Aave before depositing around $600 million worth back several hours later.
These transactions occurred as Sun-advised World Liberty Financial is supposed to be preparing its own Aave instance for launch.
What happened?
0x18709e89bd403f470088abdacebe86cc60dda12e (0x18) is an address associated with HTX to which an early hacker returned their funds. It is labeled on an HTX hot wallet on services including Breadcrumbs.
At 6:17 UTC, this HTX address initiated a withdrawal of $400 million USDT from Aave.
This was followed by 0xa03400E098F4421b34a3a44A1B4e571419517687, an address tagged as HTX on Etherscan, transferring an additional $20 million to 0x18 at 9:11 UTC.
At 9:20 UTC, 0x18 received an additional $10 million from 0xb865D3112B3CF67F09027d209c0b866BC6312a03, an address tagged as HTX on Etherscan.
This was then followed by 0x18 withdrawing an additional $150 million USDT from Aave at 9:35 UTC.
The last withdrawal from Aave came at 9:41 UTC when 0x18 withdrew an additional $20 million USDT from Aave.
Read more: Justin Sun-advised HTX plays games with its reserves
These withdrawals briefly spiked the rates on the Aave USDT pool on Ethereum, increasing the Borrow APR to 21.46% from an average of 4.66% over the last month.
Similarly, the supply APR spiked to 18.7% from an average of 3.48% for the month. After this spike at 12:40 UTC, 0x18 decided to deposit $600 million worth of USDT to Aave.
Overall, $570 million USDT was withdrawn, and several hours later $600 million USDT was deposited.
The supply APR has fallen back to 3.88%, and the borrow APY has fallen to 5.16%.
Protos reached out to HTX for clarification on why it engaged in this series of transactions, but it didn’t immediately respond.
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