The short version
- The BIRB price ran from a $0.047 close on October 19 to a $0.211 top at midnight UTC on October 24 with no news from Moonbirds, and trades near $0.122 now.
- About 73% of BIRB’s $496 million of daily volume ran through Upbit and Bithumb, and shorts on Gate and Bitget have paid about 16% in funding since October 21.
- The crew is watching $0.108 as support and $0.163 as the level to reclaim, with about 27 million BIRB unlocking on October 28.
The BIRB price has gone vertical with nothing on the calendar to explain it. Moonbirds’ token, the Solana coin of the NFT owl collection, traded at $0.122 on Coinbase at 13:15 UTC on October 24, up about 67% in 24 hours and 160% above its October 19 close of $0.047. At the top, a little after midnight UTC, it touched $0.211, four and a half times that close.
There was no listing, no partnership and no post from Moonbirds behind it. What there was is a wall of Korean buying and a crowd of traders betting against it. So who is buying BIRB, who is paying for the move, and what usually happens next?
Why Is the BIRB Price Up Today?
No announcement explains it: the buying comes from South Korea. About 73% of BIRB’s $496 million of 24-hour volume ran through Upbit and Bithumb according to CoinGecko’s market list, against $36 million on BIRB’s main Solana pool.
The timing gives it away. Each leg higher started on Korean time. On October 21 the first jump came at 00:00 UTC, 9 a.m. in Seoul, when Upbit’s BIRB market went from about $0.3 million of trading the day before to $42 million. Today it repeated at the same hour: about $78 million changed hands on Upbit between 00:00 and 01:00 UTC, and the price there went from $0.077 to $0.216 inside that hour. Upbit now shows BIRB with caution flags for price swings and soaring volume.
Before this week BIRB was scraping the floor. On October 18 it touched $0.045 on Coinbase, level with its all-time low from August, and the $0.477 record from its Upbit listing in February was a distant memory.
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Shorts Have Paid About 16% to Fight the Rally
Futures traders saw a fading NFT token jump on Korean volume and sold it. They have been paying for it since. The funding rate on BIRB perpetuals, the fee one side pays the other to keep futures near spot, flipped negative at the October 21 04:00 UTC payment and has stayed there at every four-hour payment since, on both Gate and Bitget.
Some payments were brutal. At 12:00 UTC on October 23 shorts paid 1.9% of their position in one go on both exchanges. Added up on Gate or Bitget, a short opened before October 21 has handed longs about 16% of its value in less than four days, before counting the price move against it.
This is the same setup that fuelled the IRYS short squeeze a day earlier. When the shorts pay that much to stay in, every jump at the Korean open forces some of them out, and their buy orders add to the spike. The 00:00 UTC hour on Gate alone liquidated about $34,000 of shorts and $48,000 of longs, both sides flushed in one candle.
EXPLORE: Funding Rates and Open Interest: Reading the Leverage in the Market
Doodles Ran the Same Play Three Days Earlier
BIRB isn’t the first NFT token Upbit traders picked up this week. Doodles’ DOOD went first. On Upbit it rose from about $0.0014 on October 19 to a $0.0046 top on October 21, with about $165 million traded that day. It is back near $0.0016 now, 66% below that top, and its Upbit volume has dropped to about $17 million.
The pattern is familiar from the Bubblemaps Upbit listing and IRYS: one venue’s buyers drive the move, and the price fades as soon as they move on. Other NFT names didn’t follow. Pudgy Penguins’ PENGU barely moved on Upbit this week, which points at a rotation by Korean traders rather than a comeback for NFTs.
The Solana side looks bot-heavy too. GeckoTerminal counts more than 225,000 trades in BIRB’s main pool in 24 hours, but only about 2,700 wallets buying. That is about 40 buys for every buying wallet, the footprint of trading bots rather than thousands of new holders.
DISCOVER: Market Cap, Supply and Why “Cheap” Coins Aren’t Cheap
What’s Next: a Token Unlock on October 28
Supply is the next test. RootData’s unlock tracker shows about 27.08 million BIRB, roughly $3.3 million at today’s price, unlocking on October 28 at 05:00 UTC. That is about 9.5% of the 285 million BIRB in circulation, and only a small slice of the 715 million still locked. Moonbirds’ own tokenomics split the 1 billion supply between holder rewards, partners, investors and the team:
Introducing $birb Tokenomics.
65% is allocated to the community
Holder Rewards (27%) – The rewards given to Birb and Friends and utilized to build stronger Community Development.
Ecosystem Partner Expansion (12%) – A performance based allocation to secure high-value
A token unlock after a pump hands early holders a chance to sell into strength. It doesn’t have to happen, but it is the date the crew has circled.
BIRB Price Analysis: Where Are the Levels After the Spike?
BIRB has already given back about 42% of today’s top. The sharpest drop came at 10:00 UTC, when it fell from $0.163 to $0.108 on Coinbase in one hour, and it has bounced around $0.12 since.
The levels the crew is watching:
- Bull case: a reclaim of $0.163, where the 10:00 UTC drop began, would show the Korean bid is still there; above it sits today’s $0.211 top.
- Base case: a range between $0.108 and $0.163 while volume cools and funding drifts back toward zero.
- Bear case: a break of $0.108 opens $0.077, where today’s run started, and the pre-pump area near $0.053 below that.
In short, the BIRB price is being moved by one country’s order books and paid for by shorts, not by anything Moonbirds did. Watch the 00:00 UTC hour, when Seoul wakes up, and watch funding: when shorts stop paying, the squeeze fuel is gone.
On the climb since 2017. Trades futures and reads onchain data. Automates the boring parts.
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