A Highly Illiquid Whale

Market Meditations | May 3, 2022

Roosh is the largest whale on Fantom and is responsible for the recent dump with FTM losing almost 30% of its value since 29th April.

  • Roosh deposited $50 million worth of FTM to the Scream lending protocol and borrowed against their assets (this is a collateralised loan).
  • Using the borrowed funds Roosh brought large amounts of SOLID and DEUS tokens and locked them up for 4 years.
  • Locking the tokens made Roosh highly illiquid. This means that they would not have free capital to repay their collateralised loan if they got close to a liquidation price.
  • As we entered a macro risk-off climate and the entire market started to lose value, this is exactly what happened.
  • The price of FTM began to fall which pushed the health rate of Rooshs’ loan closer to 1, leading to their position being liquidated.
  • On Scream when an individual’s loan exceeds what their collateral can support, fractions of their positions are sold.
  • The Scream protocol took Rooshs’ collateralized FTM and began selling it on the open market in order to retrieve enough money to repay the debt owed.
  • According to DEXScreener, the largest FTM pool is WFTM/USDC which currently has $92 million in total liquidity. This is a problem because trying to liquidate large sums of capital in a pool this small created liquidity issues which caused the asset price to fall.

Rooshs’ actions have crashed the FTM network and caused the token price to dump. According to their wallet, they are not at a high risk of further liquidation but should the market continue to dump a similar event could unwind.