The price of Aster’s token dropped by almost 10% after Binance founder Changpeng Zhao was rumored to have dumped over 34 million coins.
Perpetual and spot crypto decentralized exchange Aster’s token is experiencing a market slump, down by almost 7% in the last 24 hours. The market downturn comes on the backdrop of an X post from well-followed crypto investor FarzadXBT late Thursday, claiming that a “CZ Linked wallet” let go of about $30 million worth of ASTER.
Zhao himself took to X to debunk Farzad’s update, asking his followers to “unfollow the guys posting fake news.”
However, the Binance CEO’s confirmation that he did not sell Aster tokens, coupled with a confirmation from Lookonchain that the transfer had nothing to do with CZ, was not enough to stop the profit shedding.
Aster in free-fall mode, reasons beyond CZ rumors
According to several market watchers, ASTER is in a “freefall mode” after breaching its psychological support at $1.00, aided by the whole Zhao debacle. The token is barely holding on to the $0.93 level, the lower bound of its recent consolidation range.
Even though investors would like to blame the fake news brigade, ASTER has been struggling to peak $1.20 the whole of this business week. The $1.00 level has now flipped from support to resistance, a bearish signal that could invite further downside if momentum fails to recover.
According to market data from Coingecko tracked during Friday’s early Asian trading sessions, the DEX token traded roughly 18.8% below its 20-day exponential moving average, treading far away from its highest level this week by about 15.7%.
Aster’s price was consolidating around $0.94 at the time of this publication, after trading volumes cooled slightly after the morning’s sell-off. Traders will be holding off on making any decisions to look for signs of a loss-profit reversal towards a close above $1.00, before they can definitively act on their positions.
DEX TVL over $1.5 billion amid token price bloodbath
While the token’s market value suffered, DefiLlama, a DeFi analytics tracker, reported that Aster’s total value locked (TVL) has reached approximately $1.577 billion, and the total fees collected in the last month hit $131 million.
Aster recorded over $71 billion in perpetual trading volume and $618 million in spot exchange transactions in the week ending Friday, per DefiLlama’s tracking.
The DEX announced progress on its ongoing token buyback program in an X post last Wednesday, saying that all Series 3 (S3) buybacks are being conducted entirely on-chain.
“The on-chain buyback is currently in progress and will continue daily until the target range of 70% to 80% of the trading fees generated during S3 is reached,” Aster’s official X account wrote.
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