$BICO is up more than 300% in seven days, and the traders on the other side of that move are still losing money. Binance’s own account data shows more BICO shorts open than longs right now, and in the past 24 hours short positions absorbed $1.35 million of the token’s $1.70 million in total liquidations — nearly four times what longs lost. The rally itself traces to a specific moment: a perpetuals exchange listed BICO with leverage three days before the biggest leg of the move.
From a fresh low to a 300% week
Biconomy (BICO), the gasless-transaction and account-abstraction infrastructure token, bottomed at $0.01125 in late July before a short squeeze carried it to roughly $0.0157 by August 3. That bounce alone wiped out $273,170 in short positions against $237,410 in longs, a lopsided ratio that should have been a warning sign for anyone still shorting. It wasn’t heeded: the token has since run to $0.0501, up 69.6% in the past 24 hours and 323% over seven days, according to CoinGecko and CoinGlass.
BICO ranks #429 by market cap, well clear of the mega-cap names that soak up most coverage, but it isn’t some anonymous micro-cap either — CoinGlass’s own market table lists live BICO order books on Binance, OKX, Bybit, Gate, Bitget, BingX, MEXC, Bitunix, WhiteBIT, Kraken and Aster. Eleven venues with real depth is a rare thing to find this far down the rankings, and it’s the reason a move like this can actually be traded rather than just watched.
The perp listing that lit the fuse
Three days before the token’s biggest daily gain, the perpetuals exchange Aster posted a specific, dated announcement: a new BICO perpetual contract with up to 5x leverage, paired with a 1.2x trading-points multiplier running through August 11 at 23:59 UTC. Biconomy’s own account reposted it.
A fresh venue offering leverage plus a points incentive is a mechanical explanation, not a speculative one: it gives traders a new, rewarded way to take a directional bet on a token that had just come off an all-time low, at the exact moment retail sentiment was still leaning short from the failed squeeze a day earlier.
The short side keeps paying for it
CoinGlass’s positioning data shows why this has kept running rather than fading. Binance’s BICO/USDT long/short account ratio sits at 0.717 and OKX’s at 0.36 — both mean more retail accounts are short than long, even after a 300% run. That’s the setup for a squeeze, and the liquidation feed backs it up: $128.93K of the $134.97K liquidated in the last hour of checking was short positions; over 24 hours, shorts accounted for $1.35 million of $1.70 million in total liquidations, versus $354,190 from longs.
Open interest has climbed alongside price to $85.9 million rather than collapsing the way pure short-covering would produce, and funding stayed negative through most of the move — shorts were paying longs to stay in the trade the entire time they were losing on it. Futures volume over 24 hours ran to $872 million against just $112 million in spot, so whatever happens next will keep being decided in the leverage market, not the spot order book.
What the chart says the crowd missed
BICO spent most of July pinned in a tight $0.024–$0.030 range before breaking out in a near-vertical run to $0.051. On the 1-month chart, an RSI divergence indicator has flagged bearish divergence twice in the most recent leg — price printing higher highs while momentum prints lower highs — a pattern that tends to precede a pause or pullback even inside a genuine uptrend, not necessarily the end of one.
Correlation to bitcoin over the same window is weak — 0.56 over seven days and just 0.22 over 30, computed directly from CoinGecko’s own price series — while BTC itself moved only modestly in that time. This is a BICO-specific move, not a beta trade riding the broader market.
The infrastructure behind the ticker is still shipping
Biconomy isn’t a shell riding a listing headline. Its GitHub organization carries 143 public repositories, several of them — including its core Nexus smart-account contracts — updated within the hour this was checked. The project’s own figures put real usage at 70 million-plus transactions processed, 4.7 million-plus smart accounts created and $3 billion-plus in volume routed through its infrastructure since it began operating in 2019. Total value locked tied to the protocol sits at a modest $128,578, but that number reflects Biconomy’s business as a transaction-execution layer rather than a lending or liquidity protocol — TVL was never going to be the metric that tracks this business, and it isn’t the fundamentals red flag it would be for a DeFi lender.
This isn’t BICO’s first violent move this year, either. CryptoNewsLive covered a separate 166% surge in June, tied to team wallets offloading 90 million tokens into that rally. This week’s move is a different event with a different, identifiable trigger, but the token’s history of sharp, leverage-amplified swings is worth keeping in mind before treating +300% as a straight line.
The mechanics here are unusually legible for a token this far down the rankings: a real venue listed real leverage on a real down day, and the crowd that had just been burned shorting stayed short anyway. Whether that keeps being a mistake depends on whether Aster’s incentive window, which runs through August 11, keeps pulling in fresh directional bets after it closes.
