No matter how many sins you committed in your past life, today, those betting against Alpaca, the traders of the llama, have completely paid off! Unless you haven't learned your lesson—market makers will not treat retail investors as human beings unless it's really a bull market.
Congratulations to the brothers who bought at the bottom of 0.06, it directly increased nearly 30 times in 24 hours. The key point is, for a delisted coin, would you dare to hold it at the current price?
Is Alpaca a delisted coin or a listed coin? Why does it rise explosively the more it gets delisted? Aren't the market makers afraid of losing money? How can we guard against such delisted coins? Let's analyze it right away.
Hello, this is Blockchain Thinking.
1. Does Alpaca treat delisting as listing?
On April 24, 2025, Binance announced it would delist Alpaca, PDA, WING, and VIB on May 2, with Alpaca being delisted at 5 PM on April 30 in UTC+8.
In the past, delisted coins meant that mainstream platforms had a negative outlook, conveying a professional denial of the project's fundamentals. Below is a statistical table of the coins delisted by Binance in recent times, with an average drop of 32%. In short, delisted coins have never not dropped in the past.
Even recently, OM plummeted 90% just because of a post from CZ, without even mentioning delisting!
In the past, violent price pumps often occurred when a coin was about to be listed on Binance or Coinbase. Thus, ambushing in small exchanges can lead to a big bullish candle, attracting a crowd.
Alpaca and other market makers have no difference in their motivations: they simply don't care about common sense, rules, or dignity. As long as they are satisfied, it doesn't matter to them if all retail investors perish. If they don’t fleece, someone else will; if they fleece the retail investors, they also teach them a lesson, which is a form of growth education. As for the project parties, after getting rich, they might indulge in the glitz of Las Vegas for a while, and 18 months later, they will change their appearance and become a good project again.
In a word, as long as the market makers find it profitable, in the unregulated crypto space, they have no shame, and everyone should stay away from garbage altcoins. Even if you make money this time, do not get complacent, or you will eventually fall into the trap.
Of course, the starting point is to fleece the retail investors, not to do charity. Why don’t the market makers crash the price and leave, but instead pump the price for profit?
2. How do market makers profit through price pumps?
I have to praise the diligence and innovative spirit of Alpaca's market makers. Unlike other market makers who slack off, Alpaca's market makers use a 'short squeeze' strategy.
The specific approach is that market makers first rapidly pump and dump the price, coupled with negative news, to collect market chips and thus control the pricing power of the spot market. Secondly, by having the funding rate on the platform be severely negative, they look for a unified long position 3 days to 1 week before the delisting day, causing excessive price influence from the entire market shorting. Thirdly, as the delisting date approaches, the market makers start to gather good spot chips and begin to pump the price with reduced volume while going long, cooperating to squeeze shorts, leading to short liquidations, which also directly causes price increases. Finally, market makers slowly begin to unload, and this price increase especially requires a lot of market participants to close their long positions and for short sellers to open short positions. Closing long positions allows market makers to have buying power when they open long positions, while short sellers can provide selling power when market makers close long positions.
So, on the last day, the market makers went long and were particularly aggressive, resulting in Binance's funding rate jumping from -4% a few days ago to the maximum of 4% today.
You might ask, with so many long positions opened by market makers, can they unload them all? It's obviously very difficult, but when the settlement time arrives, the settlement price will be calculated based on the average price index in the last 30 minutes before delisting. So even if the market maker hasn't unloaded everything, as long as the price is high enough, the contracts will still be profitable.
If the contract is profitable, what about spot trading? Isn't that going to crash?
Of course, this is a high-probability event. It’s expected that once it hits 5 PM, spot trading will start to fall, but market makers would definitely prefer to unload from a higher price, and during the last moments of the price pump, there will inevitably be some naive retail investors chasing the price up to act as bag holders.
3. How to guard against such delisted coins?
I don't know if Alpaca will unlock new ways to play with delisted coins, leading to a wave of following suit, but it’s evident that blindly dealing with delisted coins in the future is a high-risk endeavor. The explosive rise or fall of delisted coins has already become an unpredictable quantum state.
This mainly depends on whether the market makers are proactive or just lying low. Of course, we don't know which corner the market makers are hiding in, so we can only judge based on the market movements. If the market remains stagnant for several days after the delisting announcement, it's highly likely that it will continue to drop. However, if there's a clear selling and accumulating action like with Alpaca, it could very well lead to a final frenzy.
Of course, the best precaution is to stay away.
So here I solemnly call on Binance to delist Ethereum, Dogecoin, and Pepe. Anyway, whatever coins the retail investors have, just delist them. Your delisting day is our day of release.
Some criticize Binance for manipulating funding rates, but that's a bit unfair to Binance. It simply determines the funding rate based on the basis between spot and contracts. It's just that market makers will exploit this rule loophole. I don't know if Binance will improve this rule in the future.
Although you are running a casino, you cannot condone market makers uprooting all the retail investors. How many people just want to make a small profit on a beautiful morning on International Labor Day, only to see a year's worth of hard work turned to dust.
Of course, after the emergence of 'scandalous' coins like Alpaca on Binance, it undoubtedly further weakens its own image. Last year, many new coins were launched, averaging an 85% drop. This year, after delisting the llama and then seeing such a massive rise, it’s hard not to suspect that some people at Binance are also involved. At the very least, they would be complicit in such assets; otherwise, they wouldn’t adopt a plan to delist contracts and spots separately, clearly giving market makers the opportunity to manipulate the market.
In short, do not expect any saviors in this field. It's a dark forest; learn from your mistakes.
