Long traders bore the brunt as more than $382,000 worth of Shiba Inu futures positions were liquidated in one day, wiping out $365,660 from bullish bets and losing just $17,320 on the short side.
That wave of forced closures came as a long dormant period SHIB wallet suddenly came back to life after nearly 10 months of silence, bringing new attention to a token that was already under pressure.
A wallet becomes empty
Facts from Arkham Intelligence shows that the wallet started its return with a test run – a small SHIB transfer of 10 million via a MetaMask swap.
Then the holder acted quickly, pushing nearly 400 billion tokens through BitGo’s Forwarder Smart Contract over three separate transactions: first nearly 112 billion, then nearly 190 billion, and finally 99 billion. When it was finished, the wallet contained only 110 SHIB.
The total amount transferred was SHIB 399,989,999,938. The address, which had been untouched since about August last year, was evacuated within hours.
Reading the BitGo Movement
What the transfers mean is more difficult to determine. BitGos infrastructure is often used by institutional players for OTC deals or to move assets into cold storage – neither of which is reflected in a sale on public exchanges. So while the size of the move is hard to ignore, it doesn’t confirm that any tokens have been sold on the market.
What is clear is that a holder sitting on a position worth tens of millions of dollars chose this particular week to take action – a week in which the broader crypto market was already sliding.
Shiba Inu under pressure
SHIB fell 16% over the past week, losing the psychological support level at $0.000005. At last check, the token was trading at $0.000004535, down another 3.50% in the previous 24 hours.
The decline has pushed the memecoin to the edge of the top 30 cryptocurrencies by market capitalization, with SHIB ranking 29th and having a market value of $2.65 billion.
The timing of the whale’s reactivation, which was accompanied by a wider market sell-off and a new round of liquidations, made the move impossible to ignore – even if its purpose remains unknown.
Featured image from Unsplash, chart from TradingView