After a glorious pump in price last week saw the value of Matic Network (MATIC) grow from $0.029 to $0.04 within seven days, investors were left scratching their heads following events that happened in the build-up to press time.
MATIC at the time of writing just managed to climb back to $0.017, with members of the crypto community on Twitter accusing the team of dumping their tokens on investors who bought into the euphoria of last week’s big move.
However, Sandeep Nailwall, the co-founder and chief operating officer of the MATIC project was quick to debase any such allegations, saying in a tweet shortly after the dump started:
Just woke up to this nightmare due to a distress call by someone
It will be clear very shortly that we are not behind this, as some FUD accounts are trying to insinuate
We will post a detailed analysis and we will come out stronger than ever from this evident manipulation— Sandeep Nailwal-Matic Network (@sandeepnailwal) December 10, 2019
Also, Changpeng Zhao (CZ), the CEO of Binance, which helped Matic raise funds via its Launchpad platform, stepped in defense of the India-based project.
CZ, as Sandeep suggested that there is data showing perhaps how a set of big traders who planned the dump, although it is unclear whether Binance would have had any power over trade choices made by traders through its order books.
CZ tweeted:
Our team is still investigating the data, but it’s already clear that the MATIC team has nothing to do with it. A number of big traders panicked, causing a cycle. Going to be a tough call on how much an exchange should interfere with people’s trading.
As shown in this screenshot and tweet by Twitter user ‘BTCMoonland,’ a massive sell order for MATIC was set up on Binance, which likely triggered other sales and subsequent price decline on the cryptocurrency whose total market cap is just above $100 million.
Clearing the MATIC Network FUD
The project team has provided some evidence that they are not in any way involved in the sell-off.
Aside from the large token movement being part of the project’s unlock plan, data from the blockchain shared by Ethereum developer, Econaur shows that only 290,000,000 MATIC (just 3%) were moved to Binance, not 1,495,322,715 (15%) as earlier alleged by accusers.
The accuser who in this case was Samuel JJ Gosling has also apologized for over calculating the moved funds by apparently adding to his figures, the movement of funds between the MATIC smart contract lockup account to foundation account.
I just want to deeply apologise for providing an inaccurate claim, it turns out it was only 381,903,830 $MATIC (3% of the supply) that “seems” has been liquidated, I made a miscalculation and included inputs as well as outputs in my computation. https://t.co/BHFu5GW0A2 pic.twitter.com/9xdoC19Ga6
— Samuel JJ Gosling (@xGozzy) December 10, 2019
Meanwhile, MATIC co-founder, Sandeep, added that “the tokens that were moved were also clearly communicated as a part of token release with the massive drop likely to be a “coordinated shorting attempt with spot/margin on future exchanges & FUD.”
Note: This article has been updated to provide more insights into Matic’s version of the story. An earlier version only broke the news of the token’s massive decline and allegations against the team.
