WAVES token price (CoinDesk)
Waves, a blockchain that features smart contracts and allows people to launch their own decentralized apps and tokens, has been on a wild ride over the last month, hitting an all-time high of $62.36 on March 31 before plunging more than 60 percent to trade at $23.14 as of this writing.
Waves founder Sasha Ivanov is blaming short sellers for its woes, saying they used fear tactics to scare investors into dumping the crypto.
In a thread of tweets, Ivanov claimed that short sellers at crypto trading firm Alameda Research manipulated Wave’s price and organized “FUD campaigns” to trigger panic selling.
FUD, market lingo for fear, uncertainty, and doubt, is a propaganda tactic used to sway market sentiment on an asset and influence investor perception using mostly false information to make them act in a certain way.
“They were the first to push the price on FTX, but after the position was closed with profit the subsequent short trade the opened failed, because the price kept going up. Borrowing and FUD had to bring the price down and make the short profitable,” Ivanov wrote in one of his tweets.
Ivanov is now championing a proposed system change that would make it impossible to borrow large amounts of Waves tokens through the system’s primary decentralized exchange (DEX), Vires Finance.
Even with half of its value gone in April, analysts are predicting that Waves is still poised to shed more due to its weakening technical and fundamental factors.
The coin dropped from nearly $64 on March 31 to around $27.50 on April 7, but analysis shows that its support is much lower at $25.
A Twitter thread by a user known as @0xHamZ, that called Waves a “Ponzi scheme” accused the dev team at Waves of artificially inflating the price by more than 650 percent from February to March.
A CoinDesk report also said that the kind of anti-short rhetoric taken by Ivanov was common among unstable or dishonest projects.
“Many companies that attack short sellers ultimately turn out to be engaged in fraud, with my favorite recent example being Nikola, a supposed electric vehicle manufacturer that briefly threatened to sue short sellers before ultimately admitting to having faked its product demo,” the report said.
Blaming shorts often looks to longtime financial advisors like “the last desperate deflection of a project in denial about its failures,” wrote David Z Morris, author of the book “Bitcoin is Magic” and a former academic sociologist of technology.
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