DWF Labs vs. Wintermute? A list of two major market makers

FYJ, Noc, 0x711, BlockBeats   

In recent days, bitcoin has returned to $30,000, leading the market upward, and a number of hot copycats have taken turns. Among the hot targets, OP, BLUR and ARB are made by Wintermute, while DWF Labs is behind CFX, MASK and ACH. There are even rumors that DWF Labs is the largest maker of Conflux (CFX), the leading concept in Hong Kong. The two agencies are making love in the market. There was no shortage of heat.

In addition to the apparent competition for projects in the secondary market, the two mainstream market makers are also in private discord.

Since March, DWF Labs has been shopping in the secondary market at the rate of about 5 projects per month. Such frequent sales have triggered hot discussions in the community. Some people say that DWF is not a real investment, but just to make market. In response, Andrei Grachev, a partner at DWF Labs, said two days ago, "In addition to investment, we usually bring additional support," tacit acknowledgment of this "investment + market making" hybrid mode of operation.

Interestingly, Andrei Grachev followed up with a Thread on social media that retweeted The Block's dubious pursuit of DWF Labs, and then switched gears, After reviewing The Block's four black history of "receiving secret investment from FTX", "former CEO bought a villa in the Bahamas with money from SBF", "being falsely reported by CZ about police breaking into Binance", and "deleting old news articles of his own", the key information is finally revealed: On March 31, The Block named Wintermute CEO Evgeny to its board of directors, Evgeny said"No money is involved".

Two weeks later, The Block voluntarily disclosed that Evgeny "has an equity stake."

The author then theorizes that Wintermute is directing The Block to smear DWF Labs.

The article then went on to blame Wintermute for poor market making on ARB, as well as last year's DeFi attack in which hackers stole $160 million due to Wintermute's use of smart addresses. Whether consciously or unconsciously, Andrei Grachev explained DWF Labs' security philosophy in response to a question about the company, repeating that "we never store too much money in on-chain wallets -- there are so many cases of market makers and funds being hacked that we don't want to be a victim."

There's no real evidence of the existence of the black and white manuscripts, but the tension between Wintermute and DWF Labs is real. Earlier on April 10, Wintermute CEO Evgeny retweeted Andrei Grachev's extensive history, pointing out that he was the head of Huobi Russia, It is also believed to be linked to the notorious OneCoin scam, one of the biggest in encryption history. But Evgeny focused on the poor investment performance of DWF Labs summarized in the article, calling it'Wrong market maker'.

Evgeny's barbs continued over the past two days as Andrei Grachev took to social media to talk up DWF Labs' business philosophy and reveal details of his market-making in response to questions.

It is hard not to believe that there is a real interest struggle behind such frequent space competition. By summarizing the market-making tokens of the two market makers, BlockBeats finds that there are obvious differences in style. Wintermute is dominated by European and American blue-chip projects with good fundamentals, while DWF Labs rises to the top. With East Asian projects, new and old sentiment themes as the main market-making target,They represent two very different styles of money-making in the marketHowever, it is the same that the projects of both parties basically share half of the current market alpha. OP, ARB, CFX and MASK are the focus of hot topics. Behind the discourse power of style is the share of market funds, so it is not surprising to target each other.

Wintermute participates in the market Making project.

APE

Data on the chain shows that on March 4 and 18, 2022, a total of 3.5 million APE was transferred to Wintermute's market making address in two transactions.

On March 16, 2022, the day before Ape was launched, the APE in Wintermute's signature address was transferred to the address marked Wintermute 1. Then it is sent to multiple centralized trading platforms (Binance, Coinbase, KuCoin, etc.) through intermediate addresses.

According to K line, APE will be launched on March 17, 2022, with a maximum price of $28. Wintermute will use the high price of APE on the centralized trading platform to sell, and then buy the previously sold chips from Uniswap at a relatively low price. At the same time undertake APE airdrop pressure and stabilize the price.

After repeated market making and raising on the centralized trading platform for a period of time, the price of APE was pulled close to the previous high for the second time on April 28, 2022, with the highest price of $27.602. Wintermute transferred APE to Binance again through several intermediate addresses to complete the shipment. Get a lot of revenue.

Wintermute has since started the process of gradually reducing its holdings of APE, with the goal of completely exiting the APE market by June 2022. At the time of publication, APE was offering $4.601.

OP

In June 2022, the Optimism Foundation invited cryptocurrency market maker Wintermute to offer a liquidity provisioning service to promote a smoother experience of collective governance for users who have acquired OP. To carry out this collaboration, the Foundation's "Partner Fund" has allocated a temporary grant of 20 million OP tokens to Wintermute.

In this cooperation, due to the communication and technical errors of both parties, OP theft occurred, which affected the currency price performance of OP in the initial stage of listing. But after more than a month of falling prices and trading chips, OP suddenly bucked the trend in mid-July, rising from around $0.4 to above $2.20 in 20 days.

BLUR

According to the link, Wintermute's market making address received a total of 15 million BLUR chips in two separate transactions on February 14 and 15, 2023, before transferring the chips to various trading platforms.

In terms of currency price performance, BLUR was not as satisfactory as expected. After experiencing a brief pull to a high of $1.40 in the early stage of the listing, BLUR began to fall all the way, fluctuating in the range of $0.4-0.5. It is worth noting that its outstanding performance in the last two days, from $0.56 to $0.66, an increase of nearly 20%.

ARB

According to public information, on March 23, 2023, Arbitrum Foundation transferred 50 million ARBs to the Wintermute address, of which 40 million were used for market making.

The first Layer2 ARB's initial price was in line with expectations, hovering around $1.30. Subsequently, the community reported that Arbitrum Foundation transferred and allocated ARB tokens and transferred 750 million ARBs to the "administrative budget wallet" when the AIP-1 proposal had not been passed. Affected by this, ARB dropped to about $1.1. Right now, the ARB seems to be following OP's playbook. It has been on a tear since April 13, rising more than 30 percent from a low of $1.15 after a bearish event that depressed currency prices.

At present, there are still 34.59 million ARBs in the market address of Wintermute. It is worth paying attention to whether Wintermute will replicate the pull down method of the previous OP.

DWF Labs participates in investment or market making projects

MXC

On September 1, 2022, MXC recently launched Coinbase Pro and announced that it had received tens of millions of dollars of investment from DWF, the world's top quantitative fund. Founded in 2018 in Berlin, Germany, MXC has helped communities in 177 countries to build the world's leading Web3 Internet of Things network in four years. At present, it has obtained Internet of Things and NFT on-chain applications from Deutsche Bahn, GIN 1689 and other enterprises.

It is worth noting that since the beginning of this year, the price of MXC is very depressed, from the beginning of the year around $0.033 has fallen to $0.019.

Conflux

On September 16, 2022, according to official news, Conflux received a strategic investment from Web3 venture capital firm DWF Labs, with an undisclosed amount of funding.

The CFX has been a stellar performer this year, going from $0.03 at the start of the year to $0.4 now, no problem at 10 times.

TON

On November 17, 2022, DWF Labs announced a $10 million commitment to support the TON Ecosystem. Over the next 12 months, DWF Labs also plans to make a total of 50 seed rounds aimed at accelerating the growth of TON and its programs.

Mask

On January 19, 2023, DWF Labs announced a strategic investment and partnership with Mask Network through the purchase of $5 million worth of MASK tokens, The investment will be used to support the continued construction of the decentralized social Network and the entire Mask Network ecosystem to make Web3 more accessible.

Similar to CFX, MASK is also the currency with the highest price increase in the whole market so far this year. From last year's Twitter concept coin to today's Hong Kong concept, the price of the currency has been climbing, from 0.965 in October last year to 5.76 dollars today, an increase of nearly 6 times.

YGG

On February 17, 2023, Yield Guild Games (YGG) raised $13.8 million from Token sales, led by DWF Labs and a16z. YGG co-founder Gabby Dizon revealed that YGG will use the new funding to further develop its Soul Bound Reputation Token.

YGG this year since the currency price has not been bright performance, currently continues to fluctuate at 0.2 to 0.3 dollars.

Orbs

On March 14, 2023, encryption infrastructure developer Orbs plans to raise $10 million from DWF Labs. According to Orbs, DWF Labs will purchase up to $10 million worth of Orbs tokens. Orbs chief executive Nadav Shemesh said the first tranche of the total investment was settled today. He added that the rest of the investment would be "calculated on an average basis."

SNX

On March 17, 2023, DWF Labs entered into an agreement with Synthetix's Finance Committee to provide liquidity and market-making services to SNX on its centralized and decentralized trading platforms. DWF Labs is committed to becoming a Synthetix Protocol member in a number of ways, including integrating and trading the Synthetix perpetual contract, participating in SNX governance during Epoch elections, and participating in community and product communication.

Radix

On March 23, 2023, Layer1 public Radix announced that it had completed $10 million in funding, which was fully supported by DWF Labs and reached a post-investment valuation of $400 million. Radix chief executive Piers Ridyard said the DWF had provided $8 million in funding and the remaining $2 million would be provided in the near future. Radix is understood to have a self-developed consensus system and execution environment and is expected to launch a mainnet called Babylon in the second quarter of this year.

SO-COL

On March 28, 2023, The Block reported that SO-COL, a Web3 social platform founded by Irene Zhao, had completed a $4.5 million round of funding, which was fully backed by DWF Labs.

apM Coin

On March 30, 2023, apM Coin, a blockchain customer rewards platform, announced that it had received a $5 million investment and an optional partnership contract worth $1.5 million from DWF Labs. apM Coin said that through the investment and cooperation with DWF Labs, it will jointly develop and expand apM Coin Project's interchain payment solution.

ACH

On April 3, 2023, Alchemy Pay, a Singapore-based crypto payment service provider, announced that it had closed a $10 million funding round at a valuation of $400 million. The round was led by DWF Labs and the money will be used to expand its business in South Korea.

Hong Kong and the concept of payment double stack, from the beginning of the year $0.0072 to the current $0.041, has increased nearly five times this year.

TOPGOAL

On April 4, 2023, TOPGOAL, a football meta-universe project, announced that it had received a multi-million dollar investment from DWF Labs. The announcement says the investment will enable TOPGOAL to build a football meta-universe powered by artificial intelligence and blockchain technology, further fulfilling its vision of bringing sport to Web3 and creating new digital and virtual experiences.

RACA

2023 年 4 月 6 日，链游 RACA（前身为 Radio Caca）获 DWF Labs 1600 万美元投资，该项投资包括购买若干 RACA Token，所筹资金将帮助 RACA 推进其 Web3 游戏生态系统的目标。 RACA 成立于 2021 年，最初为 Elon Musk 母亲 Maye Musk 的 NFT 管理者，目前已推出 R3 游戏基础设施、SimCity 风格的沙盒游戏 USM.WORLD、社交派对游戏 Looki Looki Jazzi、跨游戏 DID 钱包 JAZ 和 NFT 市场。

After the release of the financing news, RACA rose more than 20% at one point, and now it has fallen slightly and is in sideways volatility.

LABEL

On April 10, 2023, NFT Infrastructure Protocol LABEL announced that it had received $1 million in venture capital from DWF Labs. LABEL aims to establish a fair profit-sharing ecosystem. The ecosystem is supported by LBL utilities and governance tokens. In addition, LABEL has introduced a decentralized P2P incubation platform to invest in entertainment and education content through the DAO voting system, which provides content creators in the MOOC industry with a convenient way to promote and distribute their intellectual property rights.

RSS3

On April 11, 2023, DWF announced another $10 million investment, this time to acquire $10 million worth of tokens for RSS3. Earlier, RSS3 announced that it will launch AIOP, an open AI platform, to provide Web3 information sources for AI models such as GPT. RSS3 aims to be an innovative protocol that organically combines Web3 with AI, search engines and social media.

EOS

On April 13, 2023, EOS Network received a $60 million investment from DWF Labs. The two have signed a $45 million EOS Token purchase agreement and a $15 million investment commitment.

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