Tellor and the story of the shortest ever jail time

Bus factor in crypto, especially for smaller projects, plays (and it will probably stay this way) a huge role. Everyone probably remembers Vitalik's death hoax which sent Ethereum almost 20% down in a day and wiped $4B of its marketcap. Imagine what such news could do to a smaller project.

Just yesterday crypto Twitter blew up a story about Tellor's CEO being put in jail:

The story turned out to be fake pretty quickly, debunked by the heroine herself:

Still, the price of TRB did not like that story one bit. Let's try to look under the surface and see how the metrics are doing.

As expected, there's a big spike of age consumed after the drop, indicating a lot of old coins have moved.

Looking into transaction volume, we indeed see a confirmation:

A lot of coins were transferred as the price was falling, and then the largest amount already after the drop (this large amount was an internal Binance transfer).

Trading volume for TRB went up about 10x compared to days prior, indicating a lot of interest from traders.

Address activity also spiked as the price dropped, which could be a sign of panic among token holders.

Looking into holders distribution, we can see the opposite behaviour of the smaller cohorts versus the bigger ones (although to be fair the changes of balances aren't very substantial).

In conclusion, such a big drop in price caused by some fake tweets is a clear indication of a current state of the broader crypto market, people are scared and are ready to jump ship at first sign of danger. Is this an opportunity to get in - everyone has to decide for themselves.