Market maker Wintermute sold off huge quantities of ACT and other BNB meme coins on April 1, tanking their prices by as much as 50%. Wintermute CEO denied intentionally selling these assets and started re-buying them.

Community sleuths believe that Binance is to blame, quietly lowering the leverage position limit for ACT and other tokens. This incident may cause further mistrust and uncertainty in a shaky meme coin market.

Why Did Wintermute Sell ACT?

A chaotic incident is currently unfolding in the meme coin sector. At the center of the story is Wintermute, a market maker that recently made headlines by interacting with World Liberty’s USD1 stablecoin before the official announcement.

Today, Wintermute has sold off large quantities of BNB meme coins, especially ACT.

After Wintermute’s massive sell-off, the price of ACT subsequently fell 50%. This caused a stampede in other BNB meme coins, erasing millions of dollars and generating a lot of market chaos.

However, in a strange development, Wintermute’s CEO Evgeny Gaevoy denied deliberately causing the sale.

“Not us, for what it’s worth! [I’m] also curious about that postmortem. If I were to guess, we reacted post move, arbitraged the Automated Market Maker (AMM) Pool,” Gaevoy claimed in a social media thread.

This raised more questions than it answered. If Wintermute didn’t intend to sell off these ACT tokens and other meme coins, what triggered them? The firm even began buying ACT again after the sale. Subsequently, crypto sleuths started suspecting a quiet rule change from Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange.

Both data from Lookonchain and analysis from 0xwizard, an important community leader for ACT, alleged that Binance was involved in the Wintermute debacle. Specifically, they claimed that the exchange quietly lowered the leverage position limit for ACT. This meant that market makers who held more positions than this limit were automatically liquidated at market price.

Naturally, these allegations caused a lot of outrage. Yi He, co-founder of Binance, responded, claiming that the relevant team is “collecting details and preparing a reply.” She further said that there might be another player involved but didn’t elaborate on this. This is not her first time responding to major criticism about Binance’s meme coin policies.

Ultimately, the dust is far from settled on this issue. Most of the impacted tokens are still substantially down from their positions yesterday, which is unfortunate in this fearful market. Between HyperLiquid’s short squeeze last week and this incident with Wintermute and ACT, overreach from crypto exchanges could damage market confidence.