Sonic publicly revealed that it ended its five-year partnership with Wintermute. A few hours prior, the market maker dumped over $850,000 in S tokens, causing a 6% price drop.
Wintermute was involved in a controversial token dump last month, but today’s events may be part of a normal business interaction. Sonic claimed no foul play, stating that the market maker sold token holdings to return loaned money.
Wintermute and Sonic Part Ways
Sonic (formerly Fantom) has been on an impressive run since launching its native token in January. It hit $1 billion in TVL in only 66 days, and continued its forward momentum with a Binance airdrop.
However, Sonic’s price fell dramatically over the last few hours, as the market maker Wintermute began offloading around $857,000 in S tokens.
Intel Scout, a Sonic ecosystem decoder, was the first to connect S’s price action with Wintermute’s token dumping. He claimed that the market maker sold around 3 million S tokens in 24 hours, and several other whales disposed of even more.
Sonic’s anonymous Head of Strategy responded to these claims, revealing that the companies had split ways:
Sonic’s Head of Strategy went on to state that the company was in talks with several market makers to replace Wintermute.
Specifically, they claimed that CEX only support is “simply no longer enough,” and that this successor needs to proactively engage with Sonic’s DeFi ecosystem, community, apps, and developer team.
Even if Sonic and Wintermute had an amicable breakup, this is not the market maker’s first controversy. In January, the firm faced accusations of market manipulation after $20 million in transactions with Binance.
Last month, Wintermute’s token dump tanked ACT by 50%, only a few months after it partnered with the project. This also led to community outrage.
Nonetheless, today’s actions have not caused a similar scandal yet. If Sonic was dissatisfied with Wintermute’s actions, the company could’ve addressed this, but it didn’t.
It even gave a sympathetic reason for the token sales, explaining that Wintermute needed to return loaned funds. Wintermute, for its part, hasn’t said anything about the episode.
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