Trader Who Predicted Luna's Downfall Now Holds 450K MOON Tokens

Pseudonymous trader GCR, who made a $10 million bearish bet against Terra's LUNA cryptocurrency in early 2022, is holding large amounts of Reddit's community token Moons (MOON), an on-chain expert said, confirming claims made by a trending Reddit post.

The post by Reddit user Nutcase420 in r/CryptoCurrency subReddit alleges that GCR bought 450,000 MOON tokens from the MEXC exchange, and 24 hours ago, transferred the same to the cryptocurrency exchange Kraken via Arbitrum Nova. Moons is an ERC-20 token distributed as a reward for comments or posts in the r/CryptoCurrency subreddit channel.

The post cites a tweet, which says the Kraken deposit address — 0x5D1177F01f6607628b78fB29C73C8de751B28839 — is associated with GCR because it has previously received large amounts of ether (ETH) from GCR's Ethereum name service domain @GiganticRebirth: Ezekielx.eth.

CoinDesk reached out to GCR on Twitter, but didn't hear back.

Meanwhile, Prithvi Jhaveri, co-founder and CEO of Loch Research, confirmed the speculation.

"After conducting a bit of on-chain analysis, we were able to confirm that this Kraken address is associated with GCR. He sent millions of ETH to it from an ENS that’s confirmed to be his Ezekielx.eth. He bought 450k MOON at an average price of 40 cents-45 cents," Jhaveri told CoinDesk, adding that it is unclear when GCR acquired MOON tokens.

Social media is hailing GCR's supposed MOON holdings as a bullish catalyst for the token. "Well this was some unexpected awesome news. The positive Moons headlines keep happening, don’t know how much more I can take. What’s next, Moons on Coinbase?," one member commented on the GCR post in the r/CryptoCurrency subreddit.

MOON surged over 50% early this week after Kraken listed the token.

Early last year, GCR shorted Terra's LUNA token for $10 million, betting against Terraform Labs CEO Do Kwon that the cryptocurrency would trade lower than $88 by March 2023. LUNA crashed in May 2022 along with Terra's algorithmic stablecoin UST, destroying billions in investor wealth.