Here’s Why Bedrock (BR) is Up Over 60% Today

BR, the native cryptocurrency of the multi-asset liquid restaking protocol Bedrock, has experienced significant price movement over the past 24 hours. Notably, most of the price changes were sudden. However, the one that stands out the most is its double-digit surge.

Data from CoinMarketCap shows that BR is up more than 60% and was trading around $0.127 at the time of writing. The asset’s market cap was approximately $26.9 million, while its 24-hour volume exceeded $4.6 billion.

BR Flash Crashes and Pumps

There is considerable controversy surrounding Bedrock’s price surge. The token suddenly collapsed before experiencing a brief rally, during which its value had skyrocketed three times in just two hours. The sudden moves have raised speculation within the crypto community, with market participants wondering if they were triggered by whales or simply a flash crash.

Bedrock is one of the projects listed on Binance Alpha. The world’s largest crypto exchange, Binance, created this platform within the Binance Wallet to bring early-stage crypto projects to light. Active participants on the platform gain access to new projects and their airdrops by earning Alpha points after completing various tasks, including holding tokens and participating in trading activities.

According to the Hong Kong market expert, Fengxun, the crash was triggered by a spot market dump on a smaller exchange. BR is not listed on Binance’s spot market, but it is on the exchange’s futures platform. Since the asset has no spot trading on Binance, the exchange derives its price index from the average across other spot trading platforms, excluding Alpha. These exchanges include Huobi, OKX, Bitfinex, Bybit, MEXC, and Gate.io, and their price data is weighted based on their trading volume to promote the influence of active markets.

Market Manipulation at Play?

It is worth noting that BR has a track record of remaining stable at a particular price, regardless of major market fluctuations in other assets. The coin stayed at $0.079 for about ten days before the sudden movements.

The pseudonymous market analyst VietnamPenguin believes BR is being manipulated. They insist that Binance Alpha farmers are using “cheap wash trading” to boost volume for the project, occasionally pulling and adding liquidity to trigger pump-and-dump scenarios. The high concentration of liquidity provided by a few whales, combined with low fees and juicy annual percentage rates (APRs) offered by liquidity pools, has made this process easy.

VietnamPenguin said BR may soon face the same fate as ZKJ, the native token of the zero-knowledge proof Polyhedra network. Similar moves by liquidity providers (LPs) caused ZKJ to lose almost 90% of its value in one swing two weeks ago; the asset has not recovered since then. BR whales may one day decide to pull their liquidity, and instead of subsequently triggering another pump, they will dump all their holdings, causing the token to plummet significantly and amassing losses for traders.

Some traders have already been affected by Bedrock’s price movements. VietnamPenguin revealed that smart traders who track the wallets of LP whales noticed the liquidity being pulled from BR pools and rushed to short the project in perpetual markets. They thought the ZKJ pattern was about to repeat; however, they were disappointed as the market manipulator decided to pump Bedrock’s price, triggering millions in liquidation.

Meanwhile, Bedrock just announced that its Trade Streak rewards are now claimable on the Bedrock Alpha dashboard alongside trading fee rebates.

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