GeckoPulse: The Aftermath of Massive Liquidations

Sorting Through the Wreckage

Over the weekend, Bitcoin suffered one of the largest dumps of the year, as prices plunged by 15.7% on October 10 from $121K to as low as $102K across several CEXes.

According to CoinGlass, over $19B worth of leveraged positions were wiped out, making it the largest single liquidation day in the crypto markets.

Total open interest in the crypto market plummeted by 29.7% from $220B to $155B.

During these liquidations, several assets on Binance, such as USDE, BNSOL, and WBETH saw major depegs, with USDE falling to as low as $0.65.

Even DEXes were not spared, as the Lighter perpetuals platform suffered a significant outage lasting more than 4 hours during this period.

While Bitcoin continued to trade around $111K for the remainder of the weekend, BTC has since rebounded to $115.5k as of today.

Although most major cryptos and altcoins experienced significant pullbacks last Friday, some remained unaffected, such as ZEC, DASH, and BNB.

While others from the crypto community have expressed their disappointment at Binance for the depeg incident that occurred, the price of BNB has climbed to new all-time highs of $1,369 today.

Busting Out the HIP

The Hyperliquid DEX has deployed its HIP-3 upgrade.

The team announced earlier today that a network upgrade will take place on October 13, allowing eligible builders to launch their perpetuals markets once the update is complete.

With the upgrade, entities that have at least 500K staked HYPE will be able to deploy perpetuals markets permissionlessly, with the option of receiving up to 50% of trading fees.

Since the announcement, the price of Hyperliquid's native HYPE token has surged by 8.5% from $38.70 to $42 as of the time of writing.

Broken Alliance

AI crypto project Ocean Protocol has withdrawn from the Artificial Superintelligence Alliance (ASI) 'effective immediately' as per the project's recent blog post.

The ASI was initially formed between 3 separate projects - SingularityNET, Fetch.ai, and Ocean Protocol in March 2024.

With this alliance, the individual tokens from those projects were unified under the FET ticker, where AGIX and OCEAN holders had the option to convert their tokens to FET at a fixed rate.

However, it appears that Ocean's recent decision was made to secure independent funding and retain control over OCEAN tokenomics.

As such, the team claimed that funding for Ocean's future efforts has been fully secured.

Additionally, a percentage of profits earned from projects built using Ocean's technology will be used to buyback and burn OCEAN tokens.

At this point, 81% of the total OCEAN supply has been converted to FET, while the FET conversion bridge remains open.

Since OCEAN announced its withdrawal, the price of FET has fallen by 10.9% from $0.55 to $0.49.

From Polkadot to Ethereum

Phala, an AI project initially based on Polkadot, has passed a proposal to migrate to an Ethereum Layer-2.

According to Phala's announcement post, existing holders of Phala's native PHA token will receive the ERC version at a 1:1 ratio.

Migration to the L2 is also expected to begin before Phala's parachain slot on Polkadot expires on November 20.

Staking and governance mechanisms will remain uninterrupted, as the Phala L2 has been operational since January.

The price of PHA has remained unchanged since the proposal was passed.

Bringing on-chain action to the masses

Following in the footsteps of Binance and OKX, Coinbase has now launched DEX trading for most of its American customers.

According to a recent blog post by the exchange, the feature was originally teased in August but just made its debut on the Coinbase app yesterday.

Except for users from New York, Coinbase traders will be able to buy and sell tokens deployed on the Base Layer-2 before they are actually listed on the platform.

To facilitate this service, Coinbase has leveraged liquidity pools from Base-native DEX aggregators, such as 0x and 1inch, enabling users to access top DEXs directly within the app.

While not all Base tokens will be available at the start, the team has stated that new batches of coins will be added daily.

The team will also look to add DEX trading across other networks in the near future, with Solana being the next addition.

Jupiter Jumps on the Stablecoin Train

The popular Solana-based Jupiter DEX has teamed up with stablecoin issuer Ethena to deploy its own JupUSD stablecoin.

As the native stablecoin of the Jupiter ecosystem, the team shared that JupUSD will be deeply integrated across Jupiter’ product suite, serving as collateral for the platform’s perpetual markets and lending pools

Similar to Ethena’s previous integrations with other networks such as Sui, JupUSD will be fully collateralized using USDtb, with the addition of USDE as a secondary backing in the near future.

The stablecoin is expected to go live later this year.

The price of Jupiter’s JUP token spiked to $0.46 upon the announcement, but has since retraced by 6.5% to $0.43 today.

In Other News

Aster Airdrop Delayed. The Binance linked perp DEX Aster has delayed their scheduled October 14 airdrop to October 20 due to “potential data inconsistencies" leading to miscalculated token allocations.

Nobel Peace Prize Winner Is a Bitcoiner. Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado who won the Nobel Peace Prize last Friday is a known Bitcoiner. Machado previously spoke about how Bitcoin has been a “vital means of resistance" in Venezuela.

Hyperliquid Founder Accuses Binance. In the aftermath of the massive liquidation event over the weekend, Hyperliquid founder Jeff Yan said that centralized exchanges have “underreported liquidation data by as much as 100 times”. Specifically, Yan highlighted that “Binance reports only one liquidation order per second”.

Akash Network Exits Cosmos Ecosystem. Akash, a Cosmos appchain, will sunset its own Cosmos SDK chain as it searches for a new blockchain network to migrate to. Akash founder Greg Osuri did not reveal any timeline or plans for the migration but said that “Solana is a “strong contender”.

Ukrainian Crypto Influencer Found Dead. Konstantin Galich, also known as Kostya Kudo has been found dead inside his Lamborghini in an apparent suicide following this weekend’s market crash. Kudo allegedly managed over $65M worth of funds belonging to Ukraine’s military intelligence.

The Buzz Behind Auto-Deleveraging. Ambient Finance Founder Doug Colkitt explained in a X thread about Auto-Deleveraging, an emergency stop feature of crypto perps that was activated over this weekend. The activation caused huge market outcry as users' trading positions were forcefully closed.

“Bitcoin Jesus” Roger Ver Pays $48M Settlement. The crypto entrepreneur Roger Ver who was famous as a Bitcoin pioneer, has agreed to pay the US Justice Department $48M to end his tax fraud case.

Coinbase and Mastercard Eyes Multi Billion Dollar Deal. Coinbase and Mastercard are reportedly in advanced talks to acquire BVNK, a stablecoin-focused fintech firm at a valuation of up to $2.5B. If successful, this deal would dwarf Stripe’s acquisition of Bridge for over $1.1B. 

Bankr Back Online. Services for the AI trading bot Bankr has been restored after  it was suspended on X on Thursday. Despite the restoration, the bot still remains disabled on Telegram.

Monad Claims Live October 14. The airdrop for the L1 Monad has been announced and is set to go live on October 14. Monad previously teased their airdrop with pre-launch trading valuing their MON token at a $15B FDV.

Metamask Joins Team Hyperliquid. Crypto wallet Metamask announced the launch of in-wallet perps trading utilizing Hyperliquid. A similar feature was also launched by Phantom wallet, who also used Hyperliquid.

John Smedley’s Crypto Shooter Now in Alpha. John Smedley, the man behind hit shooter games such as EverQuest, H1Z1, and PlanetSide is debuting his crypto shooter, “Reaper Actual” into alpha playtesting. Although the game’s NFT crypto marketplace is optional, Smedley continued to face backlash for introducing crypto elements.

Hungry for Bitcoin. Hong Kong-based digital food company DDC Enterprise has secured an additional $124M in Bitcoin as they move towards their goal of holding over $1.2B worth of Bitcoin.

Coinbase Hiring Governance Token Expert. Coinbase’s Base team has posted a new job opening for a “token & governance research specialist,” which plays into the speculations that the team is preparing to launch their rumored BASE token.

PayPay Acquires 40% Stake in Binance Japan. PayPay, a major cashless digital payments firm in Japan, has just acquired a major stake in Binance’s Japanese division. This could signal a future integration of PayPay’s over 70M users into Binance’s ecosystem.