From FUD to FOMO: How FTX traders reacted to SBF’s ‘gm’ tweet

Key Takeaways

What triggered FTX’s recent spike?

A single tweet from Sam Bankman-Fried sent FTX parabolic, driving a 37% price jump and a 65% surge in derivatives Open Interest.

What does this tell us about market behavior?

FOMO has shifted from dismissing FTX news as FUD to treating hype as a bullish signal, showing how positioning reacts instantly to social cues.

2021 was the year Elon Musk’s Dogecoin [DOGE] tweets literally moonshot the market. 1,000%+ pumps, buying frenzy, and DOGE flexing as the top memecoin by market cap. What followed? A legal headache.

Fast-forward four years, and it seems nothing has changed. 

Sam Bankman-Fried, the incarcerated founder of FTX, dropped a simple “gm,” and the crypto market went into a frenzy. Social media erupted, and speculation ran wild, showing just how fragile the market still is.

Source: X (Formerly Twitter)

For context, Sam Bankman-Fried launched FTX in 2019 as a pro-focused derivatives exchange. In fact, the exchange quickly scaled to one of the top-volume platforms in crypto. 

However, in November 2022, a massive liquidity crunch exposed shaky balance sheets and mismanaged customer funds, triggering a full-blown collapse. Billions were wiped, and SBF landed in legal hot water.

Against that backdrop, his “gm” text sparked a storm of theories. The bigger takeaway? It gave the market a glimpse of how positioning could swing if SBF ever re-enters the scene. A subtle signal, perhaps?

FTX went parabolic on renewed market hype

The ripple effect of a single tweet was obvious across FTX’s markets.

On the 23rd of September, FTX’s native token [FTT] spiked 37% from its $0.80 base, marking its biggest move in nearly a year. The token bounced back to around $1.30, with the market cap hitting close to $400 million.

The real action, though, was in the derivatives space. FTT’s Open Interest (OI) jumped to a two-month high of $4.21 million, marking a 65% surge from the previous day. That’s about $1.65 million flowing in as speculation.

Source: CoinGlass

In short, the market flipped “bullish” right after the tweet. 

Why does it matter? Even though the pardon hype fizzled after a post claimed someone tweeted on SBF’s behalf, the move still showed how reactive positioning can get when FOMO kicks in.

The key here is that FOMO this time built on “hype.” There was a time when traders would shrug off FTX news as FUD, but now the same headlines are triggering momentum plays, signaling a subtle shift in market sentiment.