The fall of GARI: What’s happening with the Salman Khan backed social token

Crypto token GARI has plunged more than 80 per cent, leaving investors in a panic. GARI is offered Chingari — a popular short video platform — backed actor Salman Khan. This crash comes as the overall crypto market suffered with exchanges witnessing intensive sell-off amid black swan events such as the Luna-Terra crash, and high inflation coupled with regulatory uncertainty.
GARI is a social token which allows creators, influencers, and brands to monetise experiences or services. On July 4, 2022, at around 9:37 pm, the social token was steady at the value of $0.72 (Rs 57). However, exactly after an hour, the GARI token was trading at $0.13 (Rs 10). Shortly before midnight, the token touched an all-time low of $0.09 (Rs 7).
Soon after the crash, speculations were made that the hack could be the cause. The company refuted the rumours and blamed the market movement. We take a deep dive into the rise and fall of the GARI token.
The Salman Khan factor
The GARI token started its trading operations in January. It witnessed strong volumes on the first day of trading as tokens worth $100 million (nearly Rs 750 crore) were exchanged the company said in a release. GARI was launched Chingari, a homegrown short-video app, which went live on 12 crypto exchanges, including HUObi Global, FTX, KuCoin, Gate.io, MEXC Global, OKEx and more. Through the GARI token, Chingari enables short-form video creators to monetise their content on the blockchain.

Several othersonly invested in GARI, after Khan had endorsed the app multiple times. “Initially, even when the crypto market was down, the prices of GARI were soaring, but one fine day all hell broke loose and I’ve lost most of my savings. The only reason I had invested in GARI was because Salman Khan had several times promoted it,” said Priya Nardele, 23, Pune-based crypto trader.
“For most of us, Salman Khan was a big factor. I personally invested in the token because he had promoted the app several times. We believe in him, and thought this could make us rich,” Aneesh Matthew, 29, a Mumbai-based IT professional told .
Blame game
The crash happened after 2 million GARI tokens were sold a crypto whale (a huge investor) on the crypto exchange KuCoin, causing a massive drop. The selling off lead to panic among investors. Many investors and market watchers alleged that KuCoin was the whale that dumped its stock of GARI, while others even blamed the GARI Network itself. Both parties, however, have denied the allegations so far.
“The recent price action is just a black swan event. The prices first came down due to a big sell order of 2 million tokens and our market maker, GSR could not handle such big order. Generally, a market order can handle 600k worth of orders but no one anticipated such a high sell order of 2 million tokens. For comparison, the night before this incident, the volume was just under 300k. This order pushed GARI prices to $ 0.14 which cause further liquidations and sell-offs leading to a price crash. But at the moment it is stable at $ 0.10,” Sumit Ghosh, CEO and co-founder of Chingari told .
Johnny lyu, CEO of Kucoin believes that those remarks that KuCoin dumped do not provide any basis. “As a neutral trading platform, KuCoin will never interfere with the trend of the token price. Based on our current findings, as GARI mentioned in the announcement, the drop was market behavior, but we are still checking more trading details to find if there’s anything abnormal.”