Sahara AI’s $SAHARA token shocked many on November 29 when it plummeted by over 50% within minutes, prompting speculation from community members about what happened.
More information has come out since then, with most of the blame being focused on an unnamed market maker, as the project’s founder, Sean Ren, put forward a statement containing updates on X.
According to the post, the team has reviewed and confirmed that all token smart contracts and core infrastructures have been secure, with no signs of exploits or breaches.
How the Sahara AI team is dealing with the price crash
The post also reassured readers that the price drop was not caused by token unlock or selling. “Our TGE happened in June 2025. Unlock of core contributors & early backer tokens will not happen until a year later (June 2026), as per the unlock schedule: saharaai.com/blog/sahara-to…,” Ren wrote on X.
He claims Sahara’s fundamentals remain unchanged, which means that all operations, product development, and strategic priorities will continue as planned with the aim of creating an agentic AI economy with fair value flow.
As for what it has planned for next year, Sahara says it will continue to strengthen its AI infrastructure for professional services while expanding its business in data labeling and domain-specific agents.
It will also focus on developing agentic protocols to power next-generation agent-to-agent interaction and revenue sharing and deploy “killer” crypto x AI applications to remove frictions in crypto UX.
What happened to the $SAHARA token?
Since Sahara AI’s $SAHARA launched earlier this year on major exchanges, the token has seen its own fair share of ups and downs. However, this recent drop is its most serious in some time.
According to CoinGecko data, the token fell from an intraday high of $0.081 to a low of $0.0346. At the time of this publication, the price was hovering in the $0.043 to 0.044 range, down 42-45% in the last 24 hours, with a market cap of $107-108 million and 24-hour trading volume exceeding $378 million.
According to Crypto Fearless, the sharp drop happened amid the unwind of a large, active market maker‘s book and signaled a liquidity stress event as risk controls were triggered and positions liquidated, amplifying selling pressure on the token.
The market maker reportedly had exposure to several notable tokens, including MMT and SAHARA. After the exchange flagged what it called unusual market making in one project, linked addresses were identified and restricted. The firm’s positions were also liquidated in respect to the exchange’s risk governance framework, and analysts claim this greatly contributed to the post‑event price move.
The incident has shown that while strengthened oversight and disciplined risk controls can mitigate cascading moves, traders still need to remain mindful of counterparty risk and token liquidity in volatile conditions.
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