T: Upbit lights it at 9am Seoul, +64% in 40 minutes, perp shorts squeezed to the funding floor, and the DAO wallets never move

Subject: T, the token of Threshold Network, formed from the merger of Keep Network and NuCypher, whose main product is tBTC. Ethereum contract 0xcdf7028ceab81fa0c6971208e83fa7872994bee5, total supply 11.155B, with versions on Base, Optimism and Solana; the on-chain analysis here covers Ethereum only. Price and derivatives data come from the public APIs of Binance, Upbit and Bithumb and from CoinGecko; on-chain data from 30 days of Ethereum transfers and contract reads. Times are UTC; Seoul is UTC+9.

The short version

1. 9am in Seoul, Upbit moves first. At 00:00 UTC on 25 October, exactly 09:00 in Seoul, Upbit’s KRW-T market started to surge. In the first 5 minutes Upbit rose up to 28.8% and the Binance perp 18.7%; in the first 30 minutes Upbit traded about $22.9M, the Binance perp $18.2M and Binance spot just $3.2M. Within 40 minutes the Binance perp went from 0.004626 to 0.007587 (+64%), then slid back to 0.00543 by 18:42, +20% on the day.

2. On the perp, it was mostly shorts piling in. Open interest went from 298M to 1.25B tokens (4.2×); funding settled at −1.16% at 04:00 and hit the −2% floor at 08:00, after which Binance switched T from 4-hourly to hourly settlement, −8.8% cumulative over 24 hours. Meanwhile retail accounts going long fell from 65% to 53% and the top-trader position ratio rose from 0.93 to 1.11. The price rose while shorts added and paid.

3. No news to explain it. No new listing, no Upbit or Bithumb notice about T, no Upbit warning flag, no governance vote, no partnership. The project’s latest news was a tBTC roadmap update on 9 October with no launch dates.

4. The DAO wallets did not move. The DAO’s Timelock treasury, Council Safe and Treasury Guild Safe made no transfers out in 72 hours. The big exchange flows that day came from a handful of addresses that moved tokens between Upbit, Binance and OKX within minutes, which looks like cross-exchange arbitrage.

What T is

Threshold Network formed in early 2022 from the merger of Keep Network and NuCypher. It uses threshold cryptography to run tBTC, bringing bitcoin to Ethereum and other chains under decentralised custody. T is its governance token.

• Listing: the first 10B tokens were minted on 1 January 2022; Upbit listed the won market on 2 March 2022, the day of the all-time high of $0.2269. The price is now 97.6% lower. Binance has T spot, and the perp launched in January 2023.
• Supply: 11.155B in total, all counted as circulating by CoinGecko, for a market cap of about $62.7M. There is no hard cap: the token owner is the DAO Timelock, which can mint after a governance vote. Four mints beyond the initial 10B added 1.155B, the last of 120M on 3 January 2025; the community then passed an “eliminate inflation” proposal and nothing has been minted since.
• Organisation: since 2025, tBTC development and marketing sit with tLabs, and the DAO only governs. TIP-110, passed in July 2026, cut the DAO committee budget to zero.

The first hour

Upbit’s daily candle rolls over at 09:00 Seoul time, and the surge started right on it. For the first 25 minutes, every 5-minute bar on Upbit outtraded the Binance perp; after that the perp took over.

Perps: shorts squeezed to the funding floor

• Volume: Binance perps $293M in 24 hours; Binance spot $17.9M; Upbit ₩203.4B, about $152M; Bithumb about $20.5M. Binance perps were 16× Binance spot but only 1.4× all spot (about $210M). The spot action was in Korea: Upbit alone was 72% of all spot volume.
• Open interest: steady at $1.36M–$1.52M for three weeks before. After the start it rose from 298M tokens to 1.25B at 11:00, now 1.22B (about $6.7M). A day’s volume was 44× open interest: extremely fast turnover.
• Funding: between −0.03% and +0.005% before the move. −1.157% at 04:00, −2.000% (the floor) at 08:00, then hourly: −1.05%, −0.90%, −0.74% … −0.30% at 18:00, −8.8% cumulative over 24 hours. Shorts have been paying longs throughout. The mark price sat 2.3% below the spot index.
• Long/short: the all-account ratio fell from 1.87 to 1.11, with long accounts down from 65% to 53%; the top-trader position ratio rose from 0.93 to 1.11. The hourly taker buy/sell ratio stayed between 0.88 and 1.04, with no one-sided buying.

Put together: Korean spot led the price, new perp positions were mostly shorts, and the short side got so crowded that funding hit the floor. Two likely sources: outright shorting into the rally, and arbitrageurs buying spot on one exchange while shorting the perp as a hedge. The second fits the addresses we saw bouncing between Upbit and Binance on-chain (below). This is a reading of public data; Binance does not publish liquidations by token, so how many shorts were forced out cannot be measured.

Holders: the top 20 addresses hold 86%

T on Ethereum is highly concentrated: the top 20 addresses hold 86.3%, the top 50 93.9%.

The token contract itself is ordinary: not a proxy, no transfer tax, blacklist or pause. The only power is minting by the Timelock, which needs a governance vote. On-chain DEX liquidity is very thin, about $328 in the main Uniswap v3 pool, so price discovery happens on centralised exchanges.

Flows: the DAO stayed still, exchanges shuffled

The DAO wallets did not move. The Governor Timelock and the Council Safe made no transfers at all in 30 days; the Treasury Guild Safe made none out in 72 hours. The DAO’s only outgoing payment in 30 days was 17.4M tokens to four addresses on 3 October. Two minutes later one recipient sent 5.31M to Coinbase, another sent about 4.36M to a Binance deposit address in three transfers, and a third settled through CoW Swap. That was three weeks before the rally; on-chain it is impossible to tell whether it was pay, budget or something else, and a deposit is not a sale.

The unidentified large holders did not move either. The four linked addresses above, 0x593c… and the Jump Trading-labelled address all had zero transfers in 30 days.

Most exchange traffic on the day was arbitrage. On 25 October exchange addresses on Ethereum took in about 1.12B tokens and sent out about 1.17B. The largest transfers came from the same kind of address:

• 0x9933…3a7d withdrew 8.74M from Upbit at 07:28, deposited it back to Upbit a minute later, then sent 7.84M to Binance at 07:54;
• 0x5c81…1a5a received 11.2M from Upbit’s hot wallet at 13:11 and sent 8.45M to Binance a minute later;
• 0xfc91…c262 twice withdrew from Upbit and moved the tokens to OKX within minutes.

Addresses like these, bouncing between exchanges within minutes, are what kept the Korea premium within ±0.8%. Upbit deposits and withdrawals for T stayed open throughout.

Scorecard

Higher is better (a low “derivatives structure” means higher risk). T has the strongest fundamentals of the three tokens in this batch: tBTC is in real use, the code is open, governance is public and the contract has no backdoor. What pulls the score down is concentration, value capture that has not landed, and the extreme funding on the day.

Possible paths from here

• The heat fades and the price returns to its pre-move range (about 55%): with no news behind it, once Upbit volume drops, funding drifts back to zero, open interest falls and the price slides towards 0.0046–0.005. By 18:42 it was already 28% off the high.
• Shorts get squeezed and it spikes again (about 25%): open interest is still 1.2B tokens and funding is still negative, with shorts paying every hour. Another burst of Korean spot buying would force short covering and push the price up.
• It settles into a new range (about 15%): volume tapers off and the price holds between 0.005 and 0.006.
• A real fundamental change (about 5%): for example tBTC’s FROST migration or Reservations going live, or a concrete plan for T to capture value.

What to watch

1. Funding and open interest on the Binance T perp: funding back near zero and open interest falling means the short crowding is over; a return to 4-hourly settlement would be another sign.
2. Upbit volume and notices: Upbit lit this move; a caution flag or a deposit pause on T would make it more violent.
3. DAO Timelock 0x87f0…f45f and Treasury Guild Safe 0x71e4…7546: treasury transfers to exchanges, or a new mint proposal in governance.
4. The four linked unidentified addresses (19.3% together) and 0x593c… (9.5%): they have not moved in 30 days; if they start sending to exchanges, the size is enough to move the price.

Finally

T is unlike the other two tokens in this batch: it is not new, its product is in real use, the DAO and committee are public, and the token contract has no backdoor. None of that had anything to do with this day’s move. At 9am in Seoul, Upbit volume surged on the dot and the price rose 64% in 40 minutes; on the perp, new positions were mostly shorts, crowded enough to pin funding at the floor and push Binance to hourly settlement.

This time the project sent nothing to exchanges, and the DAO wallets did not move a token. For a token whose top 20 addresses hold 86% and whose largest holder is an exchange cold wallet, what matters more than one day’s swing is when the Korean heat fades, and when those unidentified large holders move.

This is an analysis of public data, not investment advice.

Sources

• Binance TUSDT public APIs: perp and spot hourly and 5-minute candles, openInterestHist, fundingRate and fundingInfo, long/short and taker ratios; Upbit KRW-T and KRW-USDT candles and market warning flags; Bithumb ticker; CoinGecko
• On-chain: 30 days of Ethereum transfers via a public node (eth_getLogs), mint history, totalSupply and Safe getOwners reads; Ethplorer holders; Etherscan labels; GoPlus contract checks
• Governance and project: Threshold forum (TIP-110, tBTC roadmap), Snapshot votes, Upbit notices
• Coverage: TokenPost