The BR token, listed on Binance Alpha, halved in price after 26 addresses withdrew almost $50 million in liquidity.
The Binance Alpha program prides itself on the supposed thorough vetting of its projects. However, on Wednesday, June 19, one of the program’s tokens, Bedrock (BR), fell by more than 50% following a massive liquidity dump. Social media users quickly identified several whale addresses that sold tokens in rapid succession.
According to @ai_9684xtpa, 26 addresses withdrew $47.59 million in BR token liquidity in just 100 seconds. Three of these addresses held more than $1 million worth of the token, while 13 held over $500,000.
The near-instantaneous withdrawal of liquidity triggered a price collapse. BR is currently trading 44% lower over the past 24 hours. The coordinated timing of these whale transactions has sparked speculation that the addresses may have acted in concert.
There is also the possibility that the tokens were held by team members or rogue insiders, although this has not yet been independently verified.
Binance Alpha faces criticism
Binance Alpha has become a wildly successful product, geared at marketing the Binance Wallet. Thanks to the rewards it offers to Binance Wallet users, the wallet app has become by far the biggest in terms of trading volumes.
Still, the project attracted some criticism, as traders claimed that Alpha users were getting all the rewards. What is more, the latest BR price collapse led some to call the program a bubble, with whales artificially pumping the tokens and then dumping them.
Pump and dump schemes, also known as rug pulls, are a type of crypto scheme where whales try to artificially inflate the price of a token, only to sell it afterwards.
