The price of TRB tokens has experienced a roller coaster market, with the team behind it being accused of 'market manipulation'

Header Image/Lenvato

Intern Reporters/Huang Xinying, Chen Xiaorui

Produced by/DeThings

On January 2, according to CoinMarketCap data, the price of TRB was 179.46 USDT, down 67.89% in the past 24 hours. In the early hours of January 1, TRB reached an all-time high of 714.55 USDT around 4:15, before briefly dropping below 125 USDT.

This decline resulted in approximately 75 million USD in liquidations. According to Coinglass data, about 153 million USD was liquidated across the network in the past 24 hours, with TRB experiencing liquidations of 72.58 million, surpassing Bitcoin (25.99 million USD) to rank first.

The sudden surge and drop in TRB's price have led to speculation that the Tellor team may have been involved in manipulating TRB's price. According to data tracked and cited by the on-chain analysis tool Lookonchain, after the price surge, a wallet associated with the Tellor development team may have transferred tokens worth 2.4 million USD to a cryptocurrency exchange.

Additionally, blockchain analysis company SpotonChain stated that the extreme volatility in TRB's price may also be due to 95% of its available supply being controlled by 20 large holders, commonly referred to as "whales." Beincrypto pointed out that 14 whale wallets control 76% of the TRB token supply, significantly increasing the risk of potential price manipulation and sell-off plans.

When TRB's price was around 15 USD, these "whales" began purchasing TRB. Over time, they transferred TRB to major exchanges, causing abnormal price fluctuations, likely increasing their profits.

According to the official website, the TRB token is the native token of Tellor, used to connect and coordinate data requesters, data reporters, and community governance. Tellor is a decentralized oracle network, similar to Chainlink (LINK), launched by a U.S. team in 2019, aimed at solving database issues on the Ethereum (ETH) blockchain. The system utilizes a competitive miner network to solve PoW problems, monitoring user data requests on-chain and receiving data requests off-chain. Each successful Tellor data point is mined using tokens, and the company allocates 10% of the development share to support ecosystem growth.

According to Crunchbase data, Tellor has completed three rounds of financing, raising a total of 400,000 USD. Their most recent financing was completed on April 5, 2020, in a secondary market round, with Binance and MakerDAO as the latest investors.

It is noteworthy that the extreme volatility in TRB's price has had a significant impact on some decentralized perpetual trading protocols like Synthetix (SNX) and Hyperliquid, resulting in millions of dollars in losses for SNX holders. Synthetix founder Kain Warwick revealed on January 1 that Synthetix bidders collectively lost about 2 million USD.

Reports indicate that this was due to a malfunction in the automated risk parameters of the decentralized protocol, which failed to recognize that TRB's price was being actively manipulated to create abnormal price levels.

According to Coindesk, despite the crash, TRB's annual growth rate still exceeds 1000%, making it one of the best-performing tokens last year alongside Solana's SOL and Ethereum ecosystem tokens.