On October 23, during the 19:00 UTC hour, Irys’s IRYS token peaked at 0.32757 USDT on Bitget. By 05:49 UTC on October 24, it was trading at 0.08631 USDT, approximately 74% below the top.
The same hourly candle closed at 0.11138 USDT and the next hour made a low at 0.06106 USDT, ~81% below the peak.
CoinGecko registered an all-time high of $0.296 at 19:24 UTC and priced IRYS at $0.0863 Saturday morning. At the high, those 2 billion circulating tokens were worth ~$592M.
Market cap is ~$174 million, with 20% of the 10 billion total supply in circulation.
The won pair at Upbit followed the same. It went from the 52-week low of 16.3 won on October 18 to a 52-week high of 450 won on October 23.
It was trading at 116 won early Saturday with about 954 billion won traded on a 24-hour basis.
IRYS climbed about 1,208% in a day before the reversal
The token opened on Bitget on October 23 at 0.02058 USDT. It had crept up through the morning, but leapt from ~0.044 to 0.14 between 15:00 and 17:00 UTC.
IRYS was up about 1,208% in 24 hours to $0.2806 at 3:21 p.m. ET, with a seven-day gain of ~2,083%. The price suggested a circulating value of around $561 million.
In the run, IRYS traded much higher than its May listing high of 0.08985 USDT on Bitget. Upbit opened trading for IRYS on won, bitcoin and USDT pairs on May 15.
Irys melds blockchain data storage with smart contract execution. IRYS is staked to validate the network and pays for storage and execution fees.
Even after the slide, IRYS was still up ~212% on Bitget’s rolling 24-hour window early Saturday. During that period, Bitget’s IRYS/USDT pair traded ~57.9 million USDT.
Short sellers lost ~$21.4 million on the way up
Over 24 hours, liquidations totaled ~$24.2 million, with ~$21.4 million from shorts and ~$2.8 million from longs.
Open futures positions on IRYS were about $1.22bn. The figure was also amplified by a higher price.
A forced short exit means buying the token back and this can push the price higher.
No source says what drove the run or the collapse.
Irys’s tokenomics lock team and investor tokens for the first year. Irys puts ~20% of the supply into circulation at launch.
On October 22, a Pump.fun token pushed by trader Clayton Kim’s Kimchi account rocketed to a ~$15 million market cap in minutes before losing over 98% of its value after the post was erased about 30 minutes later, according to Cryptopolitan.
Upbit’s won pair topped the IRYS trading volume. Korean traders have also sought out leverage offshore, where products linked to the Kospi index offer up to 150 times exposure, Cryptopolitan reported on October 2.
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