Tim Fries
Reddit’s crypto asset MOON saw a significant price increase on Wednesday after on-chain data revealed that a popular cryptocurrency investor known as GCR purchased 450,000 tokens. GCR is best known as a trader who successfully anticipated the demise of Terra’s LUNA and placed a $10 million bearish bet against the collapsed cryptocurrency.
Why is MOON Price Soaring?
r/CryptoCurrency Moons, the native crypto token of Reddit’s biggest crypto subreddit, shot up 25% on Wednesday on the news that a popular LUNA short-seller is holding a vast amount of MOON tokens.
In particular, the price of MOON took off after speculations emerged that pseudonymous trader GCR – the investor who predicted LUNA’s downfall and held a $10 million bearish bet against Terra’s fallen token – bought 450,000 MOONs from the MEXC exchange. The move was confirmed in a r/CryptoCurrency post by Reddit user Nutcase420, who also said that GCR then transferred the tokens to the Kraken crypto exchange using Arbitrum Nova.
“After conducting a bit of on-chain analysis, we were able to confirm that this Kraken address is associated with GCR. He sent millions of ETH to it from an ENS that’s confirmed to be his – Ezekielx.eth. He bought 450k MOON at an average price of 40 cents-45 cents.”
– said Prithvir Jhaveri, co-founder and CEO of Loch Research.
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MOON Rockets Over 80% in a Week After Kraken Listing
GCR’s massive investment in Reddit’s crypto asset was well-received among crypto proponents on social media, with MOON fans seeing the transfer as a potential price stimulus.
MOON, an ERC-20 token won as a reward for comments and other contributions in the r/CryptoCurrency subreddit, has recently staged an impressive price surge. One factor contributing to this upturn is Kraken’s listing of the token on August 7.
The popular crypto exchange announced support for MOONs and BRICK (also a token used on Reddit), elevating their prices by 82% and 572% over the past week. Before Kraken, Crypto.com also listed MOON in mid-July.
The substantial price increase in MOONs comes less than a month after Reddit made notable changes to its Terms of Service to enable the sale of the platform’s virtual assets. Earlier this year, 4.7 million MOONs were burned as part of the cryptocurrency’s migration to Arbitrum Nova.
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About the author
Tim Fries is the cofounder of The Tokenist. He has a B. Sc. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Michigan, and an MBA from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. Tim served as a Senior Associate on the investment team at RW Baird’s US Private Equity division, and is also the co-founder of Protective Technologies Capital, an investment firm specializing in sensing, protection and control solutions.
