Jane Street Seeks Dismissal of Terra Insider Suit

Trading firm Jane Street has moved to dismiss a lawsuit accusing it of insider trading during the 2022 collapse of the Terra cryptocurrency ecosystem, arguing in a federal court filing that the claims lack merit and seek to shift blame for Terraform Labs' own fraud.

The motion, filed Thursday in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, targets a February complaint brought by Todd Snyder, the court-appointed bankruptcy administrator for Terraform Labs. The suit names Jane Street, co-founder Robert Granieri, and employees Bryce Pratt and Michael Huang as defendants. It alleges they traded Terra-related tokens using nonpublic information obtained from Terraform insiders, including through communication channels linked to a former Terraform intern who joined Jane Street and group chats involving co-founder Do Kwon. According to the complaint, these actions exacerbated the meltdown of TerraUSD, the project's algorithmic stablecoin, by accelerating selling pressure.

Central to the allegations is an event on May 7, 2022, when Terraform withdrew 150 million TerraUSD from a key Curve liquidity pool. Minutes later, a wallet associated with Jane Street withdrew 85...