TNT - How Insiders played the crowd

After a nice run up from one week ago, TNT topped out at $0.113769 USD and crashed in a spectacular Pump&Dump crypto style to $0.049359 USD (over -50% in a day).

Let's take a look at what happened.

What sparked the initial pump?

Well, looks like the infamous Teeka and the Palm Beach Confidential group been up to their usual coin recommendations, which usually sees a huge rise in a coin's price following the announcement.

This time, it was no different. A leaked release as seen below,

The list includes:

• CRPT
• TNT
• ZRX
• MCO
• SNT
• SOLVE

Here's a Sanbase watchlist of Teeka's 2020 phenomenon play if you wish to track how it performs.

Following the release on May 7th, TNT shot up over 45% and carried on to make new highs.

It is rather strange that a coin like TNT is seeing such huge gains and being recommended. Especially if anyone actually did some sort of research, they would have known that TNT's usecase is gone and its future is uncertain.

TNT was mainly used in the legacy Chainpoint network but with the regulatory uncertainties around TNT, the team moved on to a new version of Chainpoint that uses Bitcoin Lightning and DOES NOT USE the TNT token at all.

The above was also hinted and reminded by the team to the TNT community as early as the start of the year. Giving everyone a fair chance to make do of what they will of the situation as it progresses.

The above screenshot was one of the last few messages the public was able to make before they made it a read-only server. Seems like public discussion ended on the same day as their legacy wallets rewards emptying deadline, March 29th.

To be fair, it does appear that the Tierion team made efforts to notify their community and did what they could to make it clear to speculators the state of things.

Naturally, TNT does look like a very very risky coin to get involved in and I have no idea how Teeka and Palm Beach Confidential does their research... But it goes to show that the crowd is irrational as always when chasing things and only realizes it when shit hits the fans.

What caused the big dump?

Less than a week after his TNT recommendation, Teeka notified his readers that they have closed their position on TNT due to some new information that came to their attention, prompting his readers to do the same.

But this notice came rather late as the price had dumped more than 40% by then.

Well of course, Teeka wasn't going to let any of his readers frontrun him.

Follow the insiders, not the crowd

Looking at on-chain metrics, we can see that Top 20 non-exchange TNT holders actually took this opportunity to reduce their tokens while the crowd remains oblivious to what's happening in the background.

Token age consumed spikes were observed around the same period, indicating that large amount of tokens that were held for a long amount of time have moved. In this case, likely to be the Top holders'.

Collectively, they have reduced their holdings by 23M tokens.

Below are some of the top addresses that held TNT anywhere between 90 days to 360 days) and fully exited their holdings to exchanges during this recent run-up.

• 0x4c1feab7e07f423c9f2b8115707d0fac7d963d8e
• 0xa628143f0292b7f4d4ba644414c57ee4003b79ff
• 0x71b9c8651d8dbaa2a686720ec6e58d6a97ea9ab6

While some insider whales were able to make some moves prior to the major dump, not all big holders had that chance. It appears that the recent dump prompted more long-term holders/other big holders to exit their positions as we observe a significant change in Token holders distribution and a huge amount of exchange inflow following the dump notice.

Token holder distribution shows the amount of holders that have certain amount of tokens.

May 11th

10,000 to 100,000 : 4281 holders

100,000 to 1,000,000 : 231 holders

1,000,000 to 10,000,000 : 22 holders

May 12th

10,000 to 100,000 : 2918 holders (-1363)

100,000 to 1,000,000 : 178 holders (-53)

1,000,000 to 10,000,000 : 16 holders (-7)

Notice that almost 50% of the whales group have left.

Zooming out, Supply on exchanges and Exchange funds flow is at its highest in 1 year, indicating huge amount of sell pressure on exchanges.

Now everyone's just hoping there's a possible pump and enough liquidity to absorb all the TNT that's looking to exit.

The Teeka game is a dangerous one, don't get caught in a Pump & Dump just because of "easy money".

Life changing gains, also comes with life changing losses. Stay safe out there folks, arm yourselves with the correct tools to navigate the crypto markets right here at Santiment. :)