"Reports of my demise are greatly exaggerated," Telegram quipped after Apple yanked the app from its store on August 4, but the market wasn't laughing. GRAM crashed to $1.29, its lowest point in three months, as traders dumped positions in the hours following reports that the platform violated Apple's policies around nonconsensual imagery. The token shed nearly 4% before the app returned online four hours later, after Telegram removed the offending content and banned associated accounts.
The fear was real in the derivatives pit. GRAM's perpetual volume exploded 490% to $123.27 million, but sellers dominated the action. Buy orders totaled just 6.7 million GRAM while sell orders hit 7.57 million, a lopsided ratio that screamed capitulation. Long positions unwound across major exchanges, with the Long/Short ratio collapsing below 1.0 on both Binance and OKX to 0.97, signaling traders had turned decisively bearish. This wasn't panic buying on dips. This was the opposite.
Technicals confirmed the damage. GRAM's RSI fell to 38, a bearish crossover that showed sellers had seized control. The token broke below its 9-day moving average at $1.40, a breach suggesting momentum could continue lower if the selling pressure held. By press time the token had bounced to $1.38, but the setup looked fragile. That modest recovery arrived largely because the core issue resolved itself once Telegram cleaned house on its platform. Without fresh negative catalysts, the technical picture could stabilize, though the whipsaw left plenty of leveraged traders nursing losses.
This article is informational only and does not constitute financial advice. Cryptocurrency markets remain highly volatile and speculative.
