Shiba Inu (SHIB) tokens pumped 70% on the back of an Elon Musk tweet that featured his pet Shiba Inu yesterday, data from multiple sources shows. Over $15 million worth of futures positions were liquidated in the process.
Floki Frunkpuppy pic.twitter.com/xAr8T0Jfdf
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 4, 2021
‘Liquidations,’ for the uninitiated, occur when leveraged positions are automatically closed out by exchanges/brokerages as a “safety mechanism.” Futures and margin traders—who borrow capital from exchanges (usually in multiples) to place bigger bets—put up a small collateral amount before placing a trade.
In traderspeak, ‘longs’ occur when investors are betting on prices of a certain asset to rise, while ‘shorts’ occur when they are betting against that asset.
Shiba Inu frenzy
$6.23 million worth of the $15 million in Shiba Inu liquidations came from Binance’s 1000SHIB futures product. Each 1000SHIB token is backed by 1,000 Shiba Inu tokens, making for easier trading and investing activity.
As such, data further shows over $5 billion worth of SHIB traded in the past day across both spot and futures markets, reaching levels not seen since May earlier this year.
Shiba Inu peaked at a local high of $0.00001513 in the late hours yesterday, correcting to $0.00001252 in the hours since. It has a current market cap of $6 billion is the 31st largest cryptocurrency by market cap as of press time.
Image: SHIB/USD via TradingView.
Meanwhile, Shiba Inu wasn’t the only meme token that put up huge moves last night. Other small-cap petcoins like Husky, Baby Doge Coin, and Floki Inu saw similar moves—pumping 50% at a minimum—while large-cap Dogecoin rose by 15%.
The post Shiba Inu trades worth $15 million liquidated as SHIB pumps 70% appeared first on CryptoSlate.