Coins that rise are all similar, but coins that plummet are all unlucky in their own way. The same is true for coin holders.
By Bright, Foresight News
The crypto is full of demons and monsters, and it is common for the price of a cryptocurrency to go to zero, but it is not common for a large-cap token to drop by more than 80% in an hour. The plot of a token being cut in half or even to the ankle in a short period of time is still particularly "conspicuous" in this volatile market.
Halfway through 25 years, Bitcoin has experienced a V-shaped trend from 100,000 to 70,000 to 110,000. During this period, how many "mudslides" formed by the large negative lines in the crypto have you avoided?
Libra is a stain that Miley cannot wash away
Meme is the main theme track in the crypto world in 2024-2025. From community meme to AI Agent's Fomo craze, memes with a market value of over $100 million appear frequently on the chain, and P players are happily fighting in various narrative gameplays.
Looking back, two presidents played a historic role in this feast of flowing memes.
The first is US President Trump. The Trump coin he sponsored and issued in January reached a market value of nearly 80 billion US dollars in two days. Many Chinese-speaking countries became famous in this battle. The single coin A8 is the most undisputed "big opportunity" in 25 years so far. It can be said that Trump's coin issuance has pushed the Meme track to its climax. For a time, the market was shocked and unanimously believed that Trump's coin issuance would become a model for politicians and celebrities from all over the world to follow.
As expected, the second candidate for the "2025 Most Influential Crypto Award", Argentine President Mile, appeared. On February 14, Mile publicly supported LIBRA, a token that was originally promoted on X as a tool to support small businesses and Argentine entrepreneurial projects. Due to Trump's coin issuance, the LIBRA issued by Mile hit a market value of 4.24 billion within half an hour. However, with the disclosure of more insider addresses' huge profit information and Mile's denial of any connection with the token, the LIBRA price crashed to $0.2 in a short period of time, becoming the first major "mudslide" in the crypto since the New Year.
If Trump is the highlight of the Meme track, then Libra is the key node of Meme's decline. According to DefiLlama data, since the Libra harvest, Solana's liquidity has dropped sharply from US$12.1 billion to US$8.29 billion, and Sol's price has also fallen by more than 20%.
According to on-chain data statistics, a total of 75,000 users were affected by the Libra flash crash, with a total loss of approximately US$286 million. The number of losers exceeded 86% of the total number of traders, which is the largest on-chain fraud in 25 years. The Libra scandal, which drained the liquidity on the chain at the time and destroyed the trust of "Celebrity Coin", exposed the ugly faces of KIP Protocol, Kelsier Ventures, Meteora, Jupiter and other "RUG PULL" related players one after another.
Hayden Davis, the CEO of Kelsier Ventures, is one of the initiators of the incident. According to rumors, he once said that he could "control" Argentine President Miley by transferring benefits to Miley's sister. In fact, Hayden Davis is a repeat offender who planned multiple Meme token "RUG PULL", involving insider trading of various Meme tokens such as MELANIA, ENRON, and BOB, harvesting more than 200 million US dollars. Hayden Davis later lightly called Libra "a Meme", which also revealed that he only regarded Meme as a harvesting tool and did not consider any substantive obligations and harvesting consequences.
The crypto world rotates at a high speed, and the threshold for loss of retail investors is very high. But what Hayden Davis said is enough to be regarded as what all Meme conspirators think. "But (everything I do) is not illegal in the Meme market. This is what happens in every transaction. This is the rule here, people know this, agree to this, and make money from this. If you want to blame this, you must blame everything else."
"This is not a capital market, this is a casino."
The most vicious "delisted coin": ACT
However, even the old community Meme is at risk of flash crash under the sophisticated system collectively constructed by exchanges, market makers, and large coin holders.
At 18:30 on the evening of April 1, 2025, ACT and other low-market-cap tokens collectively halved in half an hour, which can be called an April Fool's Day shock. Among them, ACT, which once hit the $1 billion market value mark during the 24-year AI Agent boom, fell from $0.1899 to $0.0836 in 36 minutes, a drop of more than 55%, which is astonishing.
Going back to 15:30 on April 1, Binance released an announcement on adjusting the leverage and margin tiers of multiple U-margin perpetual contracts, which involved trading pairs such as ACTUSDT, PNUTUSDT, and NEOUSDT, and stated that the adjustment time was 18:30.
The announcement was about the adjustment of the position limit and leverage margin ratio for the above token contract transactions, which obviously became the fuse for the shocking plunge in the evening. Taking ACT as an example, the maximum position limit before the adjustment was 4.5 million US dollars, and after the adjustment it was reduced to a maximum of 3.5 million US dollars.
After the crash, most users pointed the finger at Binance Exchange, believing that the exchange lowered the upper limit of holdings, triggering forced liquidation, which further triggered panic selling. In addition, the community also questioned whether Wintermute, which was previously suspected to be an ACT market maker, sold a large number of Meme tokens at the same time. Was the crash caused by the market maker's active dumping?
After 8 pm, Binance released a preliminary investigation report on the incident. The report stated that the decline in ACT was mainly due to the fact that three VIP users and one non-VIP user sold about 1.05 million US dollars of spot tokens in a short period of time, causing the price to fall.
Wintermute founder Evgeny Gaevoy also stated that the company did not participate in the leading operation of the crash of Meme coins such as ACT, and only arbitraged the AMM fund pool after the price fluctuated violently. The crash was not led by Wintermute.
For a while, only four unknown Binance users took the blame. However, CoinGlass data showed that at 18:30, Binance ACT contract holdings fell sharply by 75%, which is probably difficult to explain as the "masterpiece" of four large users selling.
At this point, ACT has basically declared a slow death. Perhaps there was no evildoer like Libra in this flash crash, but retail investors still became victims of an "accidental" mistake by the game rule makers.
VC coin zero tragedy: OM
To paraphrase Tolstoy, “All coins that rise are alike, but each coin that falls is unlucky in its own way.”
Then on April 14, 2025, MANTRA (OM) lost $5.5 billion in market value in 15 minutes in the middle of the night, plummeting by more than 90%, and directly fell from the top 25 in cryptocurrency market value to outside the top 90, which is definitely the "worst" in the crypto.
However, before the crash, OM was on a path that seemed like it would never turn back. From October 2023 to February 2025, OM rose violently from $0.017 to $9.17, an increase of nearly 540 times, which is not common for a VC coin. The market and the community attributed the myth that OM only rises and never falls to the strong dealer behind OM.
OM meets almost all the expectations of a VC coin - luxurious financing background, application scenarios (tokenization cooperation with Middle Eastern real estate groups), and listing on mainstream exchanges such as Binance. Moreover, it only goes up and never goes down.
There must be a reason for the anomaly. The entire OM project is actually very opaque. Multiple sources have revealed that the MANTRA team holds 792M OM in a single address, which is 90% of the total supply. The actual market circulation may be less than 1%. Someone commented: "The team is too lazy to even spread the supply across multiple wallets."
Analyst Mosi once wrote an article analyzing how OM, a project with only $4 million TVL, could have a FDV of more than $10 billion. In fact, the only way is to control most of the real circulation.
The MANTRA team has been airdropping OM to the PUA community. In the early days, it announced that it would distribute 50 million OM tokens within a month and promised to unlock 20% of them once they were launched. However, in actual operations, it has repeatedly delayed and changed the rules, extending the redemption cycle indefinitely, thereby achieving passive lock-up of community tokens. In fact, if the full amount of airdrops is really issued, the actual circulation of OM will increase significantly. According to the on-chain data, the price will definitely fall sharply.
In sharp contrast to the constant teasing of the community, the large OM addresses are frequently withdrawing coins and transferring them to exchanges.
On March 25, the address of Laser DIgital, MANTRA's investment institution, deposited 1.7 million OMs worth $11.49 million into Binance. According to Genç Trader monitoring, the wallet address 0x9a…1a28 transferred about $20 million of OMs to OKX one day before the crash. From the on-chain interaction records, this address had just withdrawn about $40 million of OMs from Binance in early March, and was one of the whales that had previously pushed up the price of the coin.
In addition, on-chain detective ZachXBT wrote on the day of the crash that the OM crash may be related to Denko (founder of Reef Finance) and Fukogoryushu. It is said that the two had contacted many people in the days before the OM token price plummeted by 90% to try to obtain large loans with their OM tokens as collateral. The rumors of large OTC transactions have added conspiracy theories to this seemingly well-prepared harvest.
Regarding the plunge, the MANTRA team issued a statement saying that the drop was caused by irrational liquidation and had nothing to do with the project itself, and that it was not the team's fault. Later, Mantra co-founder JP Mullin said in a podcast: "I feel bad, the community feels bad, but we didn't do anything bad." In his public statement, he hinted that the OM plunge was caused by a certain exchange, and promised "all information is open and transparent" and "buyback and destruction plan."
However, to this day, the MANTRA team has "changed its mind" as usual. After shirking responsibility and shifting conflicts, the team allowed the unimplemented plan to fall along with the price of the currency.
New sickles spawned by Binance Alpha: ZKJ, KOGE
When talking about the crypto in 2025, the innovation of Binance Alpha is definitely an unavoidable topic. However, the flash crash of ZKJ and KOGE in Binance Alpha has already dampened the enthusiasm of the public to compete for Alpha trading volume.
At 20:30 on the evening of June 15, the native token ZKJ of Polyhedra Network plummeted by more than 85% in two hours, with the price crashing from $2 to $0.29, and the market value evaporated by nearly $500 million. The governance token KOGE of 48 Club DAO fell from $61 to $8.46 in half an hour.
Coinglass data showed that between 20:00 and 22:00 that evening alone, the total amount of liquidation in the entire network reached 102 million US dollars. ZKJ alone contributed 94.336 million US dollars in liquidation, and long orders were liquidated as high as 93.6878 million US dollars, completely consuming the contract liquidity.
The points mechanism of Binance Alpha essentially creates a "liquidity illusion" - in order to obtain Binance Alpha airdrops, users need to swipe trading pairs crazily to get points. However, many Alpha tokens are still new coins or memes with large fluctuations, and rash swiping does not meet the risk preferences of Alpha players. Therefore, the tokens with good liquidity and relatively stable price in the Binance Alpha ecosystem are on the "first swipe list".
ZKJ and KOGE, which are in the eye of the storm, happened to be the two tokens with the largest trading volume on the BSC chain on Binance Alpha before the incident. The low-friction strategy of ZKJ-KOGE pair swiping was spread by word of mouth in the community and social platforms. Before the incident, the daily trading volume of this trading pair exceeded US$200 million for several consecutive days.
However, the calm before the storm will not last long. The "liquidity illusion" causes ZKJ-KOGE to LP (liquidity providers) to generally set extremely narrow price ranges. Once the illusion is punctured, a large amount of selling causes the price to break through this narrow range, and there is not enough money in the market to take over the sell orders, and only an endless death spiral is ushered in.
According to the analysis of Ai Yi, an on-chain analyst, the flash crashes of ZKJ and KOGE showed the characteristics of a carefully planned harvesting operation. The three main addresses targeted the huge transaction volume and liquidity formed by the two tokens in the context of Binance Alpha, and through the double blow of "large withdrawal of liquidity + continuous selling", the two tokens collapsed one after another:
The address starting with 0x1A2 withdrew approximately $3.76 million of KOGE and $532,000 of ZKJ bilateral liquidity twice between 20:28 and 20:33, and then exchanged 45,470 KOGE for ZKJ, worth $3.796 million, and sold 1.573 million ZKJ in batches.
The second key address withdrew approximately $2.07 million of KOGE and $1.38 million of ZKJ in bilateral liquidity, while selling 1 million ZKJ.
The third address liquidated its position after receiving 772,000 ZKJ transferred from the second address, further exacerbating the downward trend of ZKJ.
Therefore, Binance Alpha cannot be a guarantee of the security and credibility of the project. Short-term stability and high returns are just poison that makes you form a habit of thinking, so that you will still be obsessed with it when the net is finally closed.
