- teaRB hit a new 52-week high, but then saw a massive sell-off.
- Open interest increased as traders took short positions.
Market participants who tried to take advantage of the rise in Teller (TRB) prices received a big shock as 2023 ended.
On December 31, TRB price rose to $600. During the rally, some traders wanted to have a piece of the cake.
However, the price of TRB plummeted shortly thereafter. The dump resulted in a $73 million liquidation. Coinglass had the highest wipeout of any cryptocurrency contract in the last 24 hours.
Source: Coinglass
Hold the Tellor team accountable
At press time, the price of TRB was $198.35, indicating that the token is trending upward again. The Tellor project is not as popular as other coins on the market. At the time of this writing, its market capitalization ranking was 124th.
Basically, we discovered that AMBCrypto is built on top of the Ethereum (ETH) blockchain. It also serves as an infrastructure to make off-chain data available to smart contracts.
However, it seems that the Teller team was not only interested in the utility of the project.
This was due to Lookonchain’s recent revelations. According to Lookonchain, the pumping and dumping of tokens could be a case of manipulation by the Tellor team.
Smart Money Handle posted that the team had deposited $2.4 million TRB shortly after the price started to rise.
In the last 24 hours, $TRB It soared to $600 and then plummeted to $137, liquidating $68M in assets, making it the most liquidated token.
we are #teller Team deposit 4,211 $TRB($2.4 million) After price $TRB It soared.
Address: https://t.co/efHPXCiMiG pic.twitter.com/IBty2Wf2gI
— Lookonchain (@lookonchain) January 1, 2024
Therefore, it is likely that the team was also involved in dumping tokens and causing distress to retail traders.
Shorts plan to thrive…
Additionally, open interest on TRB increased to $423.24 million. Open interest is the value of derivative contracts outstanding in futures trading.
An increase in open interest (OI) means new funds have entered the market. On the other hand, a decreasing OI means traders are closing positions and draining liquidity.
Therefore, the spike in 8-hour open interest suggests that there were some traders with outstanding TRB contracts.
Source: Santiment
Is your portfolio green? Check out the TRB Profit Calculator
But what position do these traders take? This is where the OI weighted funding rate comes in. Funding rates provide insight into trader sentiment. When the funding rate is positive, traders are optimistic and hold many long positions.
However, at press time, TRB’s funding rate had dropped to -1.937%. These figures indicate that short positions were dominant in the market at the time of going to press. However, since the price is in a recovery phase, selling TRB in the meantime may not be a good idea.