New meta of token pumping explained
Yield Guild Games is a gamer-driven DAO focused on crypto gaming with a play-2-earn model; nothing special. But in a few days, the $YGG token went from $0.17 to $0.98 and then collapsed in a few hours to $0.37. At the same time, no revolution occurred within GameFi — the sector is dying. Why did this happen? Let’s analyze this.
YGG tokenomics:
- Standard: ERC-20
- Circulating supply: ~264 million
- Current Market Cap: ~ $61.7 million
- Current price: ~ $0.33
- All-time low: $0.119
- All-time high: $11.50
- Token allocation: Community — 45%, Investors — 24.9%, Founders — 15.5%, Treasury — 13.3%, Advisors — 1.8%;
- Unlocks: linear, expected to be fully released by Feb. 2027;
How to pump a token?
The formula is simple: hire market maker DWF Labs and announce the token launch on Binance Futures.
That is exactly what happened in the YGG case:
- On August 5, $YGG futures appeared on Binance at a token price of $0.25;
- Later, on August 5, the founder of DWF Labs explained his vision of the structure of sellers and buyers of $YGG at a token price of $0.42.
An interesting fact: At the peak, the price of $YGG started to diverge significantly between spot and futures, mainly because there was nowhere to borrow a spot position. The $YGG dump occurred after reaching a 30% price divergence.
The output
At one point, $YGG’s trading volume on Binance Futures reached $3 billion, which was nearly 30 times the token’s capitalization. Once again, it turns out that no technology or fundamental narrative is needed for the rapid growth of a token, just a market maker.
It is important to remember that after such pumping and selling of positions by the market maker, the price of the token rolls back to the initial set-up. This is how money is redistributed in the market.
