Wintermute, Blast, and rug pull rumors hit Plasma’s XPL launch 

Investors are blaming market-maker Wintermute, Ethereum layer 2 Blast, and early team member unlocks for the oddly disappointing launch of Plasma’s $XPL token.

Despite billions of dollars in trading volume, $XPL is already 40% below its debut high from last week, and Plasma co-founder Paul Punt is trying to debunk claims of an early unlock and other conflicts of interest.

“We’ve seen a number of rumors circulating since the launch of $XPL,” he wrote as allegations about his team dumping 800 million tokens, rug-pulling users, coordinating sales through Wintermute, and repeating the disappointing launch of Blast racked up hundreds of thousands of impressions on social media.

According to Punt as of 5:11pm yesterday New York time, Plasma team members hadn’t sold any $XPL.

He also claims that Plasma hasn’t contracted Wintermute for any service, and only employs three out of 50 team members with work experience at Blast or its predecessor Blur.

Read more: No crying in the casino: $XPL bug hits Aster, Hypervault rug pull suspected

This official clarification counters numerous allegations that $XPL tokens from Plasma’s team wallet ended up in Wintermute deposit addresses at centralized exchanges like Binance and Bybit.

Plasma’s $XPL down $1.3 billion from peak

Wintermute does support over-the-counter transactions of $XPL, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that Plasma contracted it for services.

Plasma sold $373 million worth of $XPL in a 7X oversubscribed token sale. The token’s market capitalization peaked above $3 billion on September 27 and has retraced 42% of those gains as of publication time.

Many investors gained or lost fortunes in $XPL due to the leveraged amplification of their trades through perpetual futures (“perps”) on exchanges like Binance, ByBit, OKX, Kucoin, HyperLiquid, Aster, and others.