CASHCAT, a native meme coin on Robinhood Chain, went through an extreme short squeeze early on Aug. 6, with forced buying from short sellers becoming one of the main sources of demand, according to TradingBeats, formerly known as Hyperinsight.
At 6:55 a.m. Beijing time, CASHCAT climbed from $0.10958 to a high of $0.18853 in one minute, a 72% jump. From the earlier intraday low of $0.0846, the token rebounded as much as 122.8%. The peak price implied a market capitalization of about $189 million.
Top shorts made up 37.7% of one-minute volume
During that 6:55 a.m. minute, CASHCAT recorded volume of 34.777 million tokens. The five largest short positions accounted for roughly 13.10 million liquidated tokens, equal to 37.7% of the minute’s total trading volume, with combined losses of about $1.072 million.
In the following minute, another 2.234 million tokens in short positions were liquidated, adding about $201,000 in losses. Over the two-minute stretch, five addresses were liquidated for a combined 15.334 million CASHCAT. The liquidation turnover reached around $2.249 million, and total losses came to about $1.273 million.
Breakdown of the five liquidated addresses
- An address beginning with 0xa037 lost about $446,000, leaving only about $12,000 in account equity after liquidation.
- An address beginning with 0x4f67 lost about $308,000, briefly re-opened a short, and then fully exited.
- An address beginning with 0x9a5c lost about $154,000, and its account equity fell to zero.
- An address beginning with 0x3f97 lost about $232,000, re-opened a short 19 seconds after liquidation, and added $25,000 from a sub-account labeled “cashcat sub.”
- The strategy vault named “Short the Shit” lost about $134,000 and still holds a small short position.
Backstop liquidation mechanism absorbed 8.817 million tokens
Of all liquidated positions, 8.817 million tokens were taken over by the backstop liquidation mechanism, representing 57.5% of the total. TradingBeats said the regular order book could not complete all liquidations during the spike, so forced buybacks by short sellers kept driving the price upward in a self-reinforcing loop.
Price pulled back after the squeeze
Once the short squeeze ended, positioning quickly flipped. CASHCAT was last quoted at $0.12129, down 35.7% from the peak, though still up about 38.2% over the past 24 hours.
Funding also moved higher. The hourly funding rate rose to +0.0658%, while the cumulative 24-hour funding rate reached about +0.5389%, nearly eight times the earlier level.