Wild Trading Session Sees Tellor’s TRB Token Slide From $720 to $180 in Hours

A relatively illiquid market and likely overleveraged trading positions pushed Tellor’s TRB token prices up over 250% in 24 hours on Saturday, only for the cryptocurrency to tumble and fall 70% since a lifetime peak set on Sunday.

Tellor is a so-called oracle protocol that uses blockchain-based tools to fetch and share data among different networks. Its native cryptocurrency, TRB, is used to reward users and data providers who stake the coins to maintain network security.

A rollercoaster session over the weekend saw TRB futures jump from the $180 level to as high as $737 on crypto exchange OKX, with spot prices on the exchange and Binance reaching $550.

Traders likely placed overleveraged bets on prices rising even further but were caught offside as a liquidation cascade began – jolting prices by over 70% to trade near the $175 level. Data shows the entire price movement occurred over a roughly six-hour period.

The price volatility culminated in nearly $40 million worth of shorts, or bets against, and $17 million in longs, or bets on higher prices, to be liquidated to set a record-high figure for TRB futures.

Data tracked and cited by the on-chain analysis tool Lookonchain suggests a wallet linked to Tellor's development team may have transferred $2.4 million worth of the tokens to crypto exchange Coinbase – where the tokens were likely sold – contributing to the price fall.

In the past 24 hours, $TRB soared to $600 and then plummeted to $137, causing $68M of assets to be liquidated, making it the most liquidated token.

We noticed that the #Tellor team deposited 4,211 $TRB($2.4M) after the price of $TRB skyrocketed.

Address:https://t.co/efHPXCiMiG pic.twitter.com/IBty2Wf2gI

— Lookonchain (@lookonchain) January 1, 2024

Despite the meltdown, TRB is still up more than 1,000% on a yearly basis – joining one of the top-performing bets of last year alongside Solana's SOL and Ethereum ecosystem tokens.

However, chatter about TRB in crypto circles has remained relatively lower than popular tokens such as SOL, suggesting that most of its volumes and trading interest arose from a smaller pool of traders.