The
$ARC token (also known as
$ARCSOL on some platforms), associated with the
#AI Rig Complex project, experienced a severe price drop of approximately 70-80% on February 26, 2026.
Below is a detailed analysis of why
#ARC crashed yesterday 👇
$ARC rose more than 10x since the October 10 crypto crash.
Strong movers during market capitulation stages have historically fared the best in the following bull cycles.
Some historical examples are;
•
$AAVE — pumped 10x in 2019 in the midst of the altcoin bear market, peaked at 2000X by the end of the 2021 bull market
•
$LINK — pumped over 20x in 2019, finished 2021 bull with 300x
•
$FET — pumped 10x in early 2023, at the very beginning of the last bull cycle, peaked at 60x
•
$SOL — pumped 5x in early 2023. Peaked at 30x in 2025.
So I got excited about whether
$ARC could be next cycle's best performer.
However, when I checked the coin's exchange balance moves, I saw a picture in exact contrast to our exchange-supply squeeze theory.
Read this tweet for details of the exchange-supply squeeze theory 👇
x.com/TradeSimplest/status/2…
We need the supply at exchanges to drop considerably for a pump. However,
$ARC's exchange balances had instead been skyrocketing since the price bottom— 354M tokens on October 18, but 740M by the time the price pumped over 10x. See the Nansen (
@nansen_ai) screenshot below for proof👇
So something fishy smelled to me and I checked
Gate.io's balance history on Nansen, since Gate is the token's largest holder at 57% of supply, making it the primary market maker (see the 2nd image below).
There I saw that Gate's
$ARC balance rose from 134M to a high of 650M during the same period, which exclusively accounts for that cumulative exchange-balance rise (see the last image below).
I went on and investigated those deposits to Gate, and found that almost all deposits were made from other exchanges like
#KuCoin,
#MEXC, and
#HTX.
This suggests that trading venues were deliberately restricted/reduced to suck the liquidity out.
This is the textbook definition of an 'orchestrated pump', although tokens seemed like being dumped to
Gate.io, in practice different exchange venues were converging into Gate to orchestrate the pump.
So since there hasn't been a healthy accumulation period for
$ARC, the following events led to its demise yesterday. Read the thread below to unfold what happened: 👇🧵
#cryptocrash #Altcoins #DeFi #Solana #SolanaMemes #Binance #Bitcoin #BinanceAIShortDramaContest