River Crypto Token Up 1,900% in the Last Month—What's the Deal?

A little-known crypto token—River (RIVER)—has been making waves over the last month, jumping more than 1,900% and catapulting into the top 100 tokens by market capitalization, according to data from CoinGecko.

The native token of the multi-chain stablecoin abstraction platform of the same name was trading around $5 near the end of December, but has since exploded to recently change hands around $82. At Monday’s prices, RIVER has a total market cap of about $1.6 billion, good enough to make it the 67th largest token in crypto.

The platform, which aims to remove the need for bridging stablecoins across blockchains, has earned the attention of some of crypto’s biggest personalities in Tron founder Justin Sun and BitMex founder Arthur Hayes—both of whom have championed the token in the last month.

Hayes was early to its rise, calling for additional listings on centralized exchanges as early as January 6. Since that time, the token has more than quadrupled in value despite falling prices across most of the crypto market.

Sun joined the fray last week, making an $8 million investment in the protocol to support the integration of Tron, the layer-1 network he founded, into the River ecosystem.

The promotion from Sun and Hayes helped attract attention to the token, which is up 168% in the last week, but the token’s rapid ascension may not be all that it seems.

Blockchain analytics firm CoinGlass recently used RIVER as an example of how funding rates, a fee set by exchanges to maintain balance between prices and contract prices, can manipulate the price of tokens.

“Step one is simple: Keep price suppressed while pushing funding deeply negative,” CoinGlass posted on X last week. “This concentrates short positions and builds the belief that ‘negative funding = inevitable bounce.’”

When in this setup, traders then go long, betting on the price to go up, expecting rebounds and funding payments, according to CoinGlass. In reality, the firm said this "expectation is the trap,” and it can be reset multiple times, attracting “consensus positioning.”

In this case, consensus positioning is to the upside on RIVER, which is up another 12% in the last 24 hours. It set a new high price above $87 earlier Monday.

River’s protocol manages around $161 million in total value locked (TVL), according to recent data from DeFiLlama, down from its October peak of $605 million in TVL. The firm’s over-collateralized stablecoin (satUSD) has a market cap of around $159 million, making it the 40th largest stablecoin by market cap.