Solana meme coin Act I: The AI Prophecy (ACT) crashed 55% in less than an hour on Tuesday, as millions of dollars worth of positions were liquidated on Binance. This has led to a campaign across social media to stop using the popular centralized exchange, spurred on by the hashtag #BoycottBinance.
Traders believed these liquidations came following the exchange changing its leverage and margin tiers. Put simply, Binance increased the amount of collateral traders needed to keep leveraged positions open, both long and short. Users who didn’t adjust their margin accordingly saw their accounts liquidated.
In the hour following the change, according to CoinGlass, over $3.89 million worth of ACT positions, mostly long contracts, were liquidated on Binance as the token tumbled 55%—causing a cascade of liquidations across other exchanges, including $785,540 on Bybit and $612,600 on OKX. Over a 24 hour period, according to DEX Screener, ACT fell 66% from a $179.4 million market cap to $60.5 million.
Binance later claimed in a blog post that the drop was caused by four users selling approximately $1,0150,000 worth of ACT on the exchange, adding that it is opening an investigation into the incident.
“We understand the ACT community’s concerns regarding today’s unforeseen price action, and want to clarify that these market movements were outside of our control,” the ACT X, formerly Twitter, account posted. “We will release a postmortem report once there is complete clarity on the situation and finality in the solutions we are working on.”
As the token plummeted, market maker Wintermute was caught in the cross fire when its traders saw that it was selling ACT amid the chaos. Specifically, there were four sales from the firm’s public wallet on Solana decentralized exchange Raydium totalling $255,503. But this was then followed up 15 minutes later by three larger purchases of ACT via Binance totalling $377,656.
Evgeny Gaevoy, founder and CEO at Wintermute, told Decrypt that this was a “basic arbitrage” move made by its algorithm to automatically sell on Raydium while purchasing on Binance. Gaevoy was describing an arbitrage strategy, which takes advantage of the difference in the price of ACT between two liquidity pools. Wintermute sold the tokens in the more expensive pool and bought the tokens in cheaper pool, effectively balancing the pools out.
Meanwhile #BoycottBinance started to spread across social media as traders found a number of other meme coins on the exchange that had also crashed, including Sui based token Sudeng (HIPPO) that dropped 36.5% in an hour.
“If the entire space collectively stopped using Binance, they’d no longer be the absolute terror they are [to] this industry,” pseudonymous crypto sleuth Crypto Rug Muncher posted on X. “All they do is list scams, and they’re no better than any of the other rotten CEXs out there despite their market share. Stop giving them your money, and they’d quickly become irrelevant.”
Binance is the biggest centralized exchange in the industry with a 34.7% market share in December, according to a CoinGecko report, with Crypto.com in second place holding just 11.2%. The recent uproar hasn’t changed much as, over the past 24 hours Binance processed the most spot trading volume with over $16.3 billion, according to CoinMarketCap, while Bybit sat in second place with just $2.4 billion.
Another pseudonymous on-chain detective, Dethective, highlighted that the majority of Binance listings in 2025 are currently in the red, with an average loss of 44%. Similar figures through 2024 can be seen via a Dune dashboard. Some traders believe this is because the exchange only lists “scam shitcoins” rather than focusing on legitimate projects.
ACT was listed by Binance in November, causing the token to skyrocket over 2,000% over a 10 hour period from a market cap of just $21 million to about $460 million. This came as the creator of the original Web2 ACT fundraising project, known as Amp, was denouncing the crypto token. In fact, they still call the project a “scam” to this day.
“I hereby declare my personal decision to boycott Binance,” one pseudonymous X user said, in response to the recent controversy. “I have already withdrawn all my assets from the platform and will no longer conduct any trading activity on Binance.”
As the pressure has mounted on the exchange, BNB (BNB), the native token for the Binance Smart Chain, has fallen 2.5% over the past 24 hours, despite VanEck filing for the creation of a BNB ETF on Tuesday.
Binance did not respond to Decrypt’s request for comment.
Edited by Stacy Elliott.
Daily Debrief Newsletter
Start every day with the top news stories right now, plus original features, a podcast, videos and more.
