River's Price Decline Follows Strategic Funding Announcement

Foresight News posted on X (formerly Twitter). On January 23, River announced the completion of a $12 million strategic funding round, with public support from CryptoHayes. Interestingly, shortly after the announcement, the price of RIVER peaked and then began to decline. CoinGlass has previously used RIVER as an example to discuss how funding rates can be manipulated to influence price fluctuations, highlighting that this pattern has been observed in multiple tokens over the past two years. They emphasize that many traders misunderstand funding rates, which do not provide directional signals but rather indicate the imbalance between long and short positions, showing which side of the market is more crowded. The first step involves suppressing the price while pushing the funding rate into a deeply negative territory. This results in a concentration of short positions, creating a market consensus that a negative funding rate signals an impending rebound. In the second step, some traders are induced to go long during the deeply negative funding rate phase, motivated by the expectation of a rebound and the desire to receive funding rate payments. This expectation is described as part of a trap. CoinGlass argues that during extreme negative funding rates, prices do not need to undergo a trend reversal. A controlled upward push in the market can trigger a chain reaction among short positions, including liquidations, stop-losses, and passive covering.