Decentral Block Post

The price of CEL, the native token of Celsius Network, has almost quadrupled since June 19 in what appears to be a frenzy stirred up by day traders.

CEL price short squeeze

CEL's price rose from $0.67 on June 19 to $1.59 on June 21, a 180% spike compared to the crypto market's 12.37% rise in the same period.

Notably, the rally started after PlanC, an independent market analyst, announced a $20 million bounty for anyone who could prove that the Celsius Network suffered a coordinated attack at the hands of a third party, which prompted the crypto lending firm to suspend withdrawals last week.

The announcement led to a frenzy on Twitter, with many accounts placing the hashtag #CelShortSqueeze in their bio and thus reflecting their intentions to target investors who bet that CEL's price would fall.

The hashtag was trending higher in the United States on Twitter. Meanwhile, internet queries for the keyword, "CEL short squeeze" also reached a perfect score of 100 between June 12 and J 18, according to data tracked by Google Trends. 

A week after it started its withdrawal freeze, crypto lending platform Celsius Network warned the community of a rise in fake social media accounts claiming to be affiliated with the company. 

In a blog post, the lending firm urged the community to be more vigilant, as there’s an increase in accounts that are “falsely purporting to be associated with Celsius.” In the same post, the firm announced that it will pause some of its communication channels, namely its Twitter Spaces and ask-me-anything (AMA) sessions, to focus on its ongoing liquidity and operations issues.

Additionally, the firm has highlighted that it’s working and communicating with regulators about the withdrawals, swap and transfer pauses, and is trying to find a solution. However, the firm did not mention any updates on when its users can resume withdrawals of their funds.

Meanwhile, the Gamestop-style short squeeze movement for Celsius (CEL) on Twitter with the hashtag #CELShortSqueeze has trended in the Business and Finance category. Twitter users have been posting their CEL buys to show their support for the project.

Twitter user TheTwitOnline expressed their hopes that Celsius CEO Alex Mashinsky could notice how the community is supporting the project in hopes that its team will work to give CEL further value and utility. 

Cloudflare, a significant infrastructure provider for the internet, recently experienced widespread problems, leaving many crypto exchanges down.

The content delivery network (CDN) confirmed via an update posted on Tuesday that it is experiencing issues with its services and network, and a fix is currently being implemented. However, the firm has yet to provide information regarding what went wrong, causing services across the world to come to a halt.

Cryptocurrency exchange FTX tweeted that its platform and other sites will be difficult to access for many people, claiming that the exchange is now in “post-only” mode. Crypto exchanges Bitfinex and OKEx also tweeted about the issue, with the latter asking if there is a Web3 alternative in the future.

Cloudflare, which became public about three years ago, offers web network infrastructure to businesses, allowing them to publish their material online. The infrastructure also provides security services, including distributed denial of service protection (DDoS).

This isn’t the first time that a Cloudfare outage has had ripple effects in the cryptocurrency world. In August 2020, a similar outage brought Bitfinex and other major websites to a halt.