Alpaca Finance Goes Wild: 1,100% Surge Despite Binance Delisting

Binance Drops the Hammer

Hold onto your hats, crypto fans! Binance threw a curveball on April 24, announcing they'd be kicking Alpaca Finance (ALPACA) and three other tokens to the curb. They pointed to the usual suspects: low trading volume and developers hitting the snooze button. Come May 2, ALPACA's spot trading pairs will be history, and deposits and withdrawals? Already out the door post-announcement.

ALPACA's Unexpected Rocket Ride

Here's where it gets wild. Normally, a delisting sends tokens into a nosedive, but ALPACA? It flipped the script! After a brief dip, this bad boy rocketed up by a mind-blowing 2,300% in just days, soaring from a measly $0.029 to a jaw-dropping peak of $1.47. That's a 60x jump on some pairs! Right now, it's chilling at $0.53, down 40% in the last 24 hours but still up a whopping 1,100% over the past week. Talk about a rollercoaster!

The Short Squeeze That Shook the Market

So, what's behind this crazy ride? Word on the street is it's all about a short squeeze. After the delisting news hit, traders were betting big on ALPACA crashing and burning. But when it shot up instead, they had to scramble to buy back their shorts, pushing the price even higher. It's like watching a financial thriller unfold in real-time!

Binance Turns Up the Heat

Adding fuel to the fire, Binance cranked up the pressure on short sellers. They upped the funding cap from ±2% to ±4% and cut settlement intervals from four hours to one. That made holding bearish positions not just risky, but downright expensive. It's like they were playing a high-stakes game of financial chess!

Supply Shock and Token Burns

Meanwhile, ALPACA's supply got tighter than a drum. The team hit pause on new token minting and torched about 35 million tokens—that's 18.6% of the max supply! It's like they were trying to create a supply shock to keep the price soaring.

Whales and Market Manipulation?

Some on-chain sleuths are sniffing around, suspecting market manipulation. We're talking about over $50 million in liquidated positions, with short sellers losing a cool $43 million. Could it be that some big whales were pulling the strings, catching those leveraged traders with their pants down?

A Gamestop Redux?

This whole saga's got folks drawing parallels to the epic Gamestop short squeeze of 2021, where retail traders took on the big boys and won. But the million-dollar question remains: how long can ALPACA keep this party going, especially with Binance's final delisting looming on the horizon? Buckle up, because this ride's far from over!