Investors are blaming market-maker Wintermute, Ethereum layer 2 Blast, and early team member unlocks for the oddly disappointing launch of Plasma’s XPL token.
Despite billions of dollars in trading volume, XPL is already 40% below its debut high from last week, and Plasma co-founder Paul Punt is trying to debunk claims of an early unlock and other conflicts of interest.
“We’ve seen a number of rumors circulating since the launch of XPL,” he wrote as allegations about his team dumping 800 million tokens, rug-pulling users, coordinating sales through Wintermute, and repeating the disappointing launch of Blast racked up hundreds of thousands of impressions on social media.
According to Punt as of 5:11pm yesterday New York time, Plasma team members hadn’t sold any XPL.
He also claims that Plasma hasn’t contracted Wintermute for any service, and only employs three out of 50 team members with work experience at Blast or its predecessor Blur.
Read more: No crying in the casino: XPL bug hits Aster, Hypervault rug pull suspected
This official clarification counters numerous allegations that XPL tokens from Plasma’s team wallet ended up in Wintermute deposit addresses at centralized exchanges like Binance and Bybit.
Plasma’s XPL down $1.3 billion from peak
Wintermute does support over-the-counter transactions of XPL, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that Plasma contracted it for services.
Plasma sold $373 million worth of XPL in a 7X oversubscribed token sale. The token’s market capitalization peaked above $3 billion on September 27 and has retraced 42% of those gains as of publication time.
Many investors gained or lost fortunes in XPL due to the leveraged amplification of their trades through perpetual futures (“perps”) on exchanges like Binance, ByBit, OKX, Kucoin, HyperLiquid, Aster, and others.
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Source: https://protos.com/wintermute-blast-and-rug-pull-rumors-hit-plasmas-xpl-launch/