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> While we have informed users that there are no absolute guarantees against risks

I'm... uh.... fairly certain this was not the crux of their marketing which severly downplayed the underlying risk. There is also a huge spectrum between "we cannot guarantee that there is 0 risk" (which seems to be what the above sentence is saying), and "there exists a risk that all of your funds disappears in 24 hours".

It seems like there is some serious rewriting of history going on here.

Question though, do the founders here have any potential criminal liability from this whole situation (including apparently lying about what they were doing with their customers funds)?




Further little notes from their documentation that, lets just say, "downplay the risk":

- "You will not lose your funds because all loans are 100% asset-backed." (https://stablegains.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4402680425...)

- "Regardless if crypto markets are soaring or crashing, the value of assets under our management remains stable." (https://stablegains.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4402687671...)

It's kind of shocking really that these statements are still up give how many of their other docs have been editted in the last 10 days.

---

Edit: u/ushakov is the hero of the hour for archiving those pages (https://archive.ph/O2lZV, https://archive.ph/ItERp)


>How long do you expect users can earn such high yields?

>The basis for Stablegains' rate is Anchor Protocol's yield. At the time of writing, Anchor yield is set at 18% - 20% APY and expected to remain so for a long time.

>We expect the rates of open finance protocols to beat those of traditional finance for a very long time.

https://stablegains.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4402680471...


Both of those were good to, but I didn't include them because both are either "expectations", or a reference to someone else's expectation/statement, and are not definitive statements.


https://archive.is/Rw891 archived just in case



The statements are kind of true if treat funds as the UST in your account. While the UST has remained safe, the value of UST hasn't.


“No honey, I did not lose the house in a poker game. I know exactly where it is, the only difference is that Bob owns it now”.

The statement is kind of true if you want to be very disingenuous to what people actually care about.

Also, As far as I know, no one deposited UST with stablegains. Stablegains took funds in other formats and converted it themselves.


Wow they need to see prison time for losing investors money saying their main coin was USDC


This was their old marketing:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31431915

-"15% interest. No surprises."


To be fair, the collapse of an algorithmic stablecoin is no surprise ;)


I can tell you right now that there is absolutely no safe yield in crypto currently that goes beyond 4% on a “safe” stablecoin like USDC. For truly safe (as in, huge value locked, never been hacked), the yield is more like 1.5-2%

All the high yield is in algoponzis or new protocols that carry massive protocol risk


There is absolutely no safe crypto. Full stop.


There is also no safe stock, right?

(No need to list the differences between stocks and cryptocurrencies.)


Eh, there are CeFi lenders like BlockFi/Gemini offering 7%. It's not zero risk, but the loans are partly collateralized and the borrowers are institutional entities who aren't your everyday scammer. It's better than unsecured corporate bonds in my view.


15% interest? No, surprises!


Thank you! I was looking for that image (which I'd seen before) but couldn't find it.

Will be interesting to hear the argument "Well technically there were no surprises here, because customers should not be surprised when they lose all their money investing in risky assets. Therefore, technically, we did not lie."


> "15% interest. No surprises."

I’m honestly not surprised about how things turned out.


Was it 15% monthly or 15% annual?


Well 15% monthly woud be ~535% annual and at that point you're well past "highly unlikely" and into "I'm printing money in my 20k sqft basement" territory.


We had a big Ponzi that exploded last month in Argentina (and extended to a few nearby countries). They promised a monthly interest from 7.5% to 20% (and IIRC they has even better offers for special "investors"). For example see https://www.ambito.com/informacion-general/generacion-zoe/le... autotranslation https://www-ambito-com.translate.goog/informacion-general/ge...


Dont rely on any websites & webpages existing like this link.

I can show you links where even the Wayback machine has removed content, most people will know how Google Cache has removed content, so print all copies and have hard copies safely stored away where they cant be destroyed. Houses will be broken into in order to destroy evidence, I know I've had it done to me!

This may be your only chance to out the criminals that run the world!


>Houses will be broken into in order to destroy evidence, I know I've had it done to me!

>This may be your only chance to out the criminals that run the world!

Given that the screenshot is an (instagram?) ad, there's probably such a huge papertrail that can be subpoenaed that you don't have to worry about the founder breaking into your house to destroy the only copy of the marketing materials.


Maybe you could store it on the blcokchain…


That would quite legitimately work.


I love the hubris people have in technology.


>Question though, do the founders here have any potential criminal liability from this whole situation (including apparently lying about what they were doing with their customers funds)?

While they're not exactly forthcoming with the risks, their marketing pages[1] were also careful to not make any explicit claims of safety (eg. "your principal is protected", or "you won't lose money"). The most that they claimed were "stable" returns. For good measure there's also a disclaimer mentioning the risks.

>There is a range of safeguards in place to help secure your deposits, however holding and depositing stablecoins with Stablegains and third party lending platforms still carries significant risk. Please carefully read our Terms of Use and Risk disclosures in our Learning Center before making a deposit. Any deposit with Stablegains and third party lending platforms is entirely your responsibility. You understand that your principal is at risk.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20220108232821/https://www.stabl...


> careful to not make any explicit claims of safety (eg. "your principal is protected", or "you won't lose money").

These are both explicit examples of explicit claims of safety that are still up on their documentation (at least as of 5 minutes ago)

- "You will not lose your funds because all loans are 100% asset-backed." (https://stablegains.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4402680425...)

- "Regardless if crypto markets are soaring or crashing, the value of assets under our management remains stable." (https://stablegains.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4402687671...)

Edit: Updating link to fix truncated urls


And now those are gone.

These people need to be in jail. Deleting evidence isn't going to look good in front of the judge.


In this case it's just sloppy copy pasting (copying the truncated link?) breaking the link. The original links from his other comment still works:

https://stablegains.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4402680425...

https://stablegains.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4402687671...


Yupp that was it. I guess that's the better result here.

I updated the the parent comment with the correct urls


Until they are given notice of a judicial proceedings, they don't have an obligation to retain evidence. (There is an exception that doesn't appear to apply here.)


oh. my. god.

Everyone pour one out for u/ushakov, hero of the hour: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31462674


Thanks for unearthing this. In light of this, I'll admit it looks pretty bad for them.


The pages are gone... That was too fast.


See my other comment, the links were just improperly pasted, not taken down.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31462851




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