On August 4, the YGG token, which had been tepid for more than three months, saw unusual movements. Its price returned to above $0.2 at around 1 a.m. on the same day, and began a crazy rise that lasted less than four days. At around 8:30 p.m. on August 7, the price of YGG soared and briefly broke through $0.9, then plunged, falling 60% in four hours. As of 4 p.m. on August 8, the price of YGG hovered around $0.35.

In the past few days, the abnormal price trend of YGG, which eventually achieved a "double kill of longs and shorts", has once again staged a classic plot of some happy and some sad for retail investors in the secondary market. In addition, during this period, many whales, market makers and investment institutions chose to stop while they were ahead, and immediately completed part of the shipment before the big dive or when the plunge just began.

Market makers and investment institutions are waiting for opportunities to sell

The starting point of the surge was at 8 pm on August 4, when Binance announced that it would launch YGG 1-20x U-based perpetual contracts. Since August 4, YGG's funding rate has greatly exceeded -0.1%. After the Binance perpetual contract was launched on August 5, the contract holdings also reached hundreds of millions of US dollars, which was equivalent to the circulating market value of YGG at that time. After the price of the currency rose during this period, a short squeeze occurred, and the shorts were forced to close their positions and continue to buy YGG, which further drove the rise of YGG.

This short squeeze reached its peak on the evening of August 7, with YGG rising by more than 50% in one hour. Due to the drastic market fluctuations, Binance also issued an urgent announcement to shorten the YGG perpetual contract funding rate settlement time from 8 hours to 2 hours. Subsequently, Binance contract data showed that at 10 o'clock that night, YGG's funding rate had reached the maximum rate of -2.5%. At the same time, the market was completely reversed, and the price of YGG began to fall freely.

After the price of YGG rose, market makers and investment institutions smelled the best time to ship.

According to on-chain data, market maker Wintermute Trading transferred the most YGG to exchanges among all institutions. Its wallet deposited a total of 11.1 million YGG (about 6.7 million US dollars) to the exchange within 4 days before August 7. Another aggressive market maker, DWF Labs, transferred 3,649,995 YGG (the current price is US$0.61, a total of about 2.23 million US dollars) to Binance at around 10 pm on August 6. It is reported that DWF Labs received 8 million YGG from the YGG Treasury on February 10, 2023. It had been transferred to Binance twice before, 700,000 on February 14 (the current price of YGG is about US$0.28) and 3.65 million on June 19 (the current price of YGG is about US$0.14).

In addition to market makers, several YGG investment institutions have also begun to wait for opportunities to sell. BITKRAFT Ventures deposited 1.57 million YGG (about $907,000) in Binance through Wintermute Trading and FalconX. Sfermion deposited 1.2 million YGG (worth about $735,000) in Binance through FalconX.

In addition, YGG's seed round investor Youbi Capital transferred a total of 5 million YGGs to Binance on August 7, depositing 1 million YGGs (about 613,000 US dollars) into Binance at around 2 a.m., and transferring tokens to Binance twice one hour ago just after YGG plummeted, both times in an amount of 2 million.

In addition to institutions, two large investors also profited from the surge, depositing a total of 3.57 million YGG (about 2.06 million US dollars) in Binance. Among them, a whale with an address starting with 0x639B deposited 2 million YGG (about 1.16 million US dollars) in Binance.

Treasury assets exceed $260 million, GAP Season 4 is online

While accumulating strength and just starting to surge, YGG just started its Guild Advancement Plan (GAP) Season 4 and released the guild's second quarter report.

According to official introduction, in the second quarter of this year, YGG focused on developing game products and infrastructure on the basis of brand renewal. It signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with Web3 Games Collective, Game7, Magic Eden, etc., and established a partnership with XPLA, a blockchain gaming platform under Korean game company Com2uS, and assumed the role of XPLA blockchain initial validator in the second quarter.

YGG has also strengthened cooperation with other major partners such as Polygon and Ronin to further support YGG's game manufacturers and games built on Polygon; as a validator of the Ronin blockchain, it plays a more important role in protecting and maintaining the network. It is reported that YGG has established 83 partnerships since its establishment, with a total cost of US$18.37 million, most of which are web3 game assets and tokens. According to official data, as of June 30, 2023, the assets held by YGG in these 83 partners are worth approximately US$27 million.

As of August 8, the main assets of the YGG treasury include approximately 737 million YGG, 6.38 million USDC and 730,000 USDT, totaling US$265 million. Of course, the value of the treasury assets is affected by the price fluctuations of YGG.

YGG's GAP (Guild Advancement Program) Season 3 ended in May this year. The event distributed a total of 488,000 YGG tokens, doubling the previous season. GAP is an achievement-driven community token distribution protocol. The first season was launched in April last year. Participants need Polygon-based YGG guild badges to access tasks. It uses a gamified approach to complete the distribution of digital assets such as YGG tokens and YGG NFTs. Through this protocol, guild members who make meaningful contributions to the community, projects, and operations will be rewarded.

GAP Season 4 has now officially started on August 3, 2023, and will last until September 27, 2023. Based on Season 3, and based on community feedback and the GAP Committee's introduction, the guild has added two new games this season, and all participating games will offer more than 150 missions, an increase of 66% from the 90 missions in the previous season. As a result, YGG said that Season 4 will be the largest and most influential season of GAP to date. More games have been added to the GAP roster this season, including the Metaverse MMORPG, GensoKishi Online, the skill-based arena RPG game Champions Ascension, and the shooting game My Pet Hooligan, which combines GTA with Pixar, and the highly engaged exploration game Pixels in Season 3 will continue to participate in the program.

In fact, YGG's achievements in the bear market are unremarkable. The surge in the market in the past few days can only be described as a "bloodbath" in the secondary market caused by the launch of the contract and insufficient liquidity of concentrated chips. Under the double kill of long and short positions, the only beneficiaries are probably the institutions.

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