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In the altcoin bear market, which tokens have the best cost-effectiveness for short selling?
南枳
Odaily资深作者
2025-04-17 06:34
This article is about 958 words, reading the full article takes about 2 minutes
Tokens that were listed at high valuations in the early stages and have a low unlocking ratio are likely to be high-quality short-selling targets.

Original | Odaily Planet Daily ( @OdailyChina )

Author|Nan Zhi ( @Assassin_Malvo )

Since BTC peaked in early February and fell below the $100,000 mark again, the overall market sentiment and trend began to decline significantly. Especially after Libra brought down the Solana Meme, the few active tracks in the market also became quiet. SOL fell from a high of $295 to a low of $95, a drop of 67.8%.

In this context, the old VC coins and meme coins began to fall, and tokens such as ACT and OM staged a farce of being cut in half again in a short period of time. At the same time, the bubble of token valuation was punctured. For example, the circulation market value of newly launched VC tokens such as SHELL was only 30 million US dollars, and few projects had an opening market value of more than 100 million US dollars.

Therefore, tokens that were listed with high valuations in the early stage and have a low unlocking ratio are likely to be high-quality short-selling targets . This article will sort out the data of tokens listed on Binance Futures and provide readers with this data as a potential reference for operations.

Basic Situation

Statistical objects: Tokens that are still available for trading on Binance Futures and listed after January 1, 2023

Data sources: Token market value is taken from CoinGecko, token listing time is taken from Binance Futures API, token unlocking ratio is taken from token.unclocks and CoinGecko

Further explanation: The unlocking ratio of token.unclocks is calculated by the website based on the project white paper and actual announcement. We believe it is a relatively more accurate unlocking ratio , but the coverage is small. Therefore, CoinGecko's circulating market value/FDV is also used as a backup unlocking ratio.

Results

Binance Futures has listed a total of 216 tokens after 23 years. Token.unclocks provides unlocking data for 106 tokens. The tokens with a circulating market value of more than 100 million and less than 100 million are divided into the following two charts:

Market value greater than 100 million

Market capitalization less than $100 million

In theory, the higher the market value and the lower the circulation ratio (red), the more worthwhile it is to short sell . For example, when the first statistics were taken, the unlocking ratio of OM was only 10%, but the market value was as high as 6.2 billion US dollars. In theory, the short selling odds of OM were extremely high.

The current market capitalization is greater than 100 million US dollars, and the unlocking ratio is less than 25% including OM, TRUMP, MOVE, STRK, LAYER, MORPHO, KAITO, ZK, DRIFT and USUAL. There are more with a market capitalization of less than 100 million US dollars and a ratio of less than 2%. Readers can check it out in the table, so I will not repeat it here.

At the same time, it should be noted that it is not the case that you can directly short sell if the unlocking ratio is low. It also needs to be decided in combination with the unlocking situation of the tokens. For example, although the unlocking ratio of ONDO is not high, it is unlocked only once a year (as shown in the figure below). In the short term, there will be no selling pressure from unlocked tokens in the market, and the low unlocking ratio cannot be a reason for short selling.

How else can you choose besides looking at the proportions?

Initially, the author believed that there were three types of tokens that were best not to be empty, including:

  • Historical demon coins (SUI, OM, etc.)

  • DeFi tokens with continuous and stable income (PENDLE, etc.)

  • Korean influence (UXLINK, IP)

However, judging from the actual situation in the past two weeks, these "historical monster coins" have now entered the closing stage , so some tokens that were previously strong but have performed poorly recently can also be included in the short selling category.

CoinGecko unlocking ratio reference

Using CoinGecko's circulating market value/FDV as the unlocking ratio and screening tokens with a market value greater than 200 million US dollars, the situation is as follows.

The unlocking ratio of most tokens has not changed substantially, but several low-circulation tokens for which token.unlocks does not provide data have been added, including IP, WAL, BERA and PLUME .


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