Sonic Price Drops 6% as Wintermute Sells Token

Sonic publicly disclosed that they have ended their five-year collaboration with Wintermute. A few hours earlier, the market maker had sold over 850,000 USD of S token, causing a 6% price drop.

Wintermute had been involved in a controversial token selloff last month, but today's event may be part of a normal business interaction. Sonic affirmed no fraudulent behavior, stating that the market maker sold tokens to repay a loan.

Wintermute and Sonic Part Ways

Sonic (previously Fantom) has had an impressive development since launching its native token in January. They have reached 1 billion USD TVL in just 66 days, and continued their growth with an Airdrop from Binance.

However, Sonic's price has dropped significantly in the past few hours, as the market maker Wintermute began selling around 857,000 USD of S token.

Intel Scout, a Sonic ecosystem decoder, was the first to link the S price action to Wintermute's token selloff. He noted that the market maker sold about 3 million S tokens in 24 hours, and some other whales have sold even more.

Sonic's anonymous strategy lead responded to these claims, revealing that the companies have parted ways:

Sonic's strategy lead further stated that the company is negotiating with several market makers to replace Wintermute.

Specifically, they believe that only supporting CEX is "simply no longer enough," and the successor needs to actively engage with Sonic's DeFi ecosystem, community, applications, and development team.

Even if Sonic and Wintermute have parted ways peacefully, this is not the first time this market maker has faced controversy. In January, the company faced market manipulation allegations after executing a 20 million USD transaction with Binance.

Last month, Wintermute's token selloff reduced ACT's price by 50%, just a few months after they partnered with the project. This also led to community outrage.

However, today's action has not yet caused a similar scandal. If Sonic was unhappy with Wintermute's actions, the company would have spoken up, but they did not.

They even provided a sympathetic reason for the token sale, explaining that Wintermute needed to repay a loan. For their part, Wintermute has not commented on the matter.