$SIREN, the token that went online during the "Broccoli" era of guessing CZ's dog's name on Binance Alpha with a contract, has almost been forgotten.

But during the past two days when the whole network was discussing its "surge," the token's network-wide settlement volume ranked fourth, behind only Bitcoin, ETH, and XAU, at approximately $23.25 million. If it weren't for Trump mentioning TACO and causing a fluctuation in the price of gold again, SIREN would be in third place.

At one point, the token's price approached $5, corresponding to a market value of approximately $3.675 billion, briefly entering the top 30 cryptocurrency market cap rankings, surpassing old tokens such as OKB and UNI.

In the sluggish market, this is not the first time we have seen such a phenomenon. $PIPPIN, $RIVER, $BEAT, $MYX... By sorting out the questions related to $SIREN, what kind of experience can we gain from these similar situations?

Is There a Trace of the "Leverage Scam"?

As early as March 5, @c_ckoko tweeted, "It is obvious that $SIREN is clearly manipulating absolute control, which is a way to harvest users across exchanges."

His tweet well explained how this "leverage scam" operates: the depth gap of the spot trading platform allows significant fluctuations with a small amount of funds, impacting the Binance contract price for harvesting.

Moreover, as he suggested in his tweet, the $SIREN contract price index was adjusted. At the time of his tweet, the influence on the $SIREN Binance contract price index was Gate spot 50%, Kucoin spot 12.5%, Binance contract 12.5%, Binance Alpha 25%. After two adjustments, the current contract price index distribution is Gate spot 25%, Kucoin spot 12.5%, Binance contract 12.5%, Binance Alpha 50%.

According to Arkham data, Gate held only 64,000 $SIREN tokens on March 22.

In this case, a trading volume of $100,000 can create a one-minute candle with a nearly 40% fluctuation.

Looking at the open interest, $SIREN has shown significant abnormality since February 8th. The open interest, which had long hovered between $3-5 million, suddenly surged to $58.83 million.

Of course, signs of abnormality do not necessarily lead to a specific outcome. After all, the chips are held by the controlling market makers, and we cannot be sure how they will harvest.

Tactic

First is fund control, accumulating a large amount of spot chips and opening large long positions to drive the price up.

Blockchain analyst Ember (@EmberCN) aggregated the market control situation of $SIREN and found that up to 88.5% of the circulating $SIREN is controlled by whales that can be traced on-chain. If the portion held by whales on centralized exchanges is included, this number would be even higher.

The above tweet also indicated that DWF Labs might be the entity in control during this event, but DWF Labs co-founder Zac denied this claim in the group chat.

After pumping the price, whales deceive retail traders with a fakeout, initiating a short squeeze to make them feel like the market top is imminent.

As seen in the fee rate chart above, starting from March 14th, $SIREN has frequently experienced high negative fee rates, where shorts continue to fund the whales' long positions. The whales then use this "free" money to further boost the price. In the early hours of March 23rd, Gate's spot market saw a violent 78% swing in just 10 minutes, with a trading volume of only about $450,000. $SIREN's price surged from $2.75 to nearly $5. This means many people got liquidated.

At this point, $SIREN may not be over yet. Looking at the past actions, the whale may still decide to partially close long positions, dump spot, create a massive bearish candle, and then close the short positions at a much lower cost than the short entry. Comparing the trends of $RIVER, $POWER, and $BEAT with $SIREN in the same chart reveals that $SIREN seems to be missing one final move.

As this article is being released, the above speculation has been confirmed:

Conclusion

Regardless of the current market's sentiment, the emergence of this kind of rug pull is always undesirable. Indeed, some trading experts may be able to benefit from the whale's maneuvers in the information fog, but for the vast majority of retail investors, it is nothing more than an utterly unfair gamble.

When such a blatant rug pull incident occurred within the top 30 cryptocurrency market cap, all I could do was sigh.

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