pump and dump
Nigerian Pop Artist Shills Meme Coin and Price Briefly Doubles — Followers Question Artist’s Motives
The Nigerian pop artist and celebrity, Davido, recently posted several tweets endorsing ‘rapdoge,’ the so-called “first deflationary meme token fully supported by celebrities & rappers.” In one of the tweets, Davido tells his 9.5 million followers to “buy $20, $100 or $1000 worth of rap doge tokens and be ready to make some money.” Pump […]YouTuber accused of engineering multi-million pump n dump via Uniswap
The YouTuber denied accusations he has rug-pulled on his followers while asserting that Million token is a “social project” that “should not be considered an investment.”
An ex-Google tech lead and YouTuber with more than 1.1 million subscribers has been accused of engineering a multi-million dollar “pump and dump” scheme.
Patrick Shyu, known pseudonymously as TechLead on YouTube, launched the Million token (MM) via Initial Dex Offering (IDO) on leading decentralized exchange Uniswap on July 1.
The project’s website describes Million as a pre-mined cryptocurrency with a fixed supply of one million tokens that are backed by one USDC each per token. The website emphasizes that despite only being backed by $1 million worth of stablecoins, MM has “no maximum value.”
After being priced at $1.00 on launch, MM saw a mammoth 3,500% increase within just three days to hit $36.87 on July 4. The price has since crashed, declining by 58% to sit around $15.26 at the time of writing.
The immediate crash that followed Million’s price high has led to accusations the project is a pump and dump on Twitter, with user “DCF GOD” highlighting the large sums of liquidity that had been pulled from Uniswap by the same address that minted MM tokens.
“By removing liquidity and not selling, he's effectively selling without 'selling'. This way he doesn't have to tell the community that he sold while they all bought, he just has to hold his initial promise of keeping 1m of usdc liquidity,” they argued.
Okay last tweet since I have folks telling me I don't know how uniswap works
— DCF GOD (@dcfgod) July 5, 2021
You can ignore all the liquidity stuff and just compare balances
Techlead start balance:
- 1M $USDC
- 1M $MM
Techlead current balance:
- 3M $USDC
- about 113k $MM
He has sold MM and gained $2M
Shyu responded to the thread, labeling it “absolute FUD,” arguing: “this is literally how liquidity works in Uniswap V3 [...] liquidity ranges are created, you literally cannot do it any other way.”
Popular commentator “ChainlinkGod.eth 2.0” commented that TechLead had completely missed DCF’s point, stating: “You've created a ‘get rich quick’ scheme so you can dump on your followers, you've added liquidity when the price is low and removed it when the price was high and profited the difference in $USDC.”
Related: CoinMarketCap launches Ethereum token swaps powered by Uniswap
Shyu published a YouTube video on July 6 addressing the accusations, denying that he “rug-pulled” investors by removing liquidity. However, the YouTuber also emphasized that MM “should not be considered an investment,” describing the project as a “social experiment:”
“Million tokens should not be considered an investment by any means. This is a social experiment and really pure speculation, it's kind of a game for us to see what happens with this, kind of like Dogecoin.”
Internet Computer (ICP) logs revenge recovery after crashing 95% since launch
The long-awaited rebound came as the community accused the Internet Computer team of dumping $6 billion worth of ICP tokens.
Internet Computer (ICP) rose to spotlight among day-traders after rising 41.69% on Sunday.
The ICP/USD exchange rate closed the session at $42.98 after correcting lower from its intraday high of $45.01. At its quarter-to-date low, the pair was trading at $28.31. Meanwhile, on Monday, it surged to a new intraday high of $47.63. Therefore, its latest rebound returned as much as 68.27% in paper profits.
The major price retracement in the Internet Computer market also followed a steeper 95% decline since ICP's debut more than a month ago across leading cryptocurrency exchanges, including Binance and Coinbase. Therefore, the cryptocurrency's revenge rebound in the previous 24 hours did little in offsetting its prevailing bearish bias.
What crashed ICP?
Some community members alleged that Dfinity, the Zurich-based nonprofit backing the Internet Computer project, has dumped almost $6bn worth of ICP since the token became tradable. Redditor @trapsandwich, who claims to be an early investor, wrote a detailed analysis more than a month ago on r/Dfinity, noting that wallets linked to the Internet Computer team continuously sent their tokens to exchanges
Dfinity moderators on Reddit removed the post.
@trapsandwich also claimed in another Reddit post that Dfinity locked the ICP tokens — that their early investors had held — for an extra month after they listed the token across crypto exchanges. But at the same time, the firm did not lock any of its own 111 million ICP holdings.
Another Redditor @Beneficial-Source147 claimed that the amount of ICP tokens Dfinity dumped since genesis was as high as 90 million. However, other Redditors jumped in defense, stating that most ICP transfers were grants dedicated to developers, not sales.
Overall, the accusations hinted that Internet Computer purposefully blocked its investors from accessing ICP markets. Meanwhile, the token continued its way downward also amid an overall cryptocurrency market correction.
But the Internet Computer's turned out to be more drastic than its top blockchain rivals, including Ether (ETH), Cardano. So it appears, overvaluation risks were at play.
In detail, traders priced ICP differently across multiple cryptocurrency exchanges atop its debut. For instance, the ICP/USD exchange rate was as high as $3,161 on Binance on the first day. Meanwhile, on Coinbase, the pair's intraday high was as much as $630.
The ICP's circulating supply on May 11 was approximately 134.8 million against the total cap of 469.2 million. Therefore, on Binance, the Internet Computer's market cap was worth more than $426 billion. At that time, it would have made the Dfinity blockchain project the third most valuable after Bitcoin and Ethereum. Ethereum's market cap topped at $482.881 billion on May 11.
What's now for ICP?
As a project, Internet Computer is another contender trying his luck in the ongoing blockchain scalability war. But instead of relying on miners and small-scale validators to operate a public ledger, Dfinity's undertaking proposes to build large data centers and high-end node machines that could provide more bandwidth to its project.
“If the IC succeeds at replacing legacy IT, there would be no need for centralized DNS services, anti-virus, firewalls, database systems, cloud services, and VPNs either,” also noted Mira Christanto, a researcher at crypto analytics platform Messari.
ICP had a remarkable debut following its high-profile listings across major cryptocurrency exchanges. The token also boasted support from a flurry of renowned investors, including Andreessen Horowitz's venture fund a16z crypto and Polychain Capital, a crypto-focused hedge fund in New York helmed by Olaf Carlson-Wee, who earlier served as the head of Risk at Coinbase.
Unrealistic valuations and excessive liquidity right atop its launch may have hurt ICP. Nevertheless, the token remains oversold since its launch, according to its relative strength index's readings, which may serve as a buy signal to some traders.
The author has reached Internet Computer for additional comments.
This unknown cryptocurrency soared by 164,842% in hours, only to crash 99%
One random cryptocurrency's market valuation jumped by billions of dollars in just three hours, reaching the 17th spot on the top crypto index.
About $7.65 billion entered the cryptocurrency market in just three hours via a widely unknown altcoin on June 14.
Dubbed as WebDollar (WEBD), the token's per-unit price surged from $0.0003711 to $0.6121 between 0900 GMT and 1200 GMT. That marked a little over 164,842% gains in its market valuation. Nevertheless, the price spike accompanied declines in volumes; they dropped from around $345.2K to $318.94K during the rally.
Breaking down those three hours of wild price action illustrated a sequence of incredible pumps and dumps.
According to data fetched by CoinMarketCap.com, the first WEBD jump took its market capitalization from $1.84M at 0954 GMT to $1.5B at 0959 GMT — that's just three minutes.
Later, as of 1039 GMT, the market capitalization fell back to $5.12M, followed by another spike to $9.5B at 1129 GMT.
At one point in time, WebDollar had become the 18th largest cryptocurrency project by market cap, beating more established blockchain protocols like Stellar, VeChain and Tron.
But then, the volatile madness came to an end as the token's market valuation crashed by more than 99% less than two hours after topping at $9.5B. As of 0700 GMT on Tuesday, it was $10.38M. Meanwhile, WebDollar's crypto ranking fell from 18 to 873.
The IndoEx factor
WebDollar's price action on Monday showed characteristics of a pump-and-dump token. Apprehensively, the project's market capitalization sprinted upward and downward by multi-billion dollars even as its trading volume remained confined within the $400K range. And looking closely, 99.23% of its trading activity originated from a single exchange called IndoEx.
IndoEx LTD is registered in the United Kingdom under company number 12029621. The exchange is said to be headed by a person named Collins Spencer, who serves as its chief executive and financial officer. Another entity, called Grace North, currently serves as IndoEx's chief technology officer.
Cointelegraph's attempt to locate the two executives on LinkedIn and Twitter returned no results. Meanwhile, a run through IndoEx's reviews by its previous customers showed them accusing both Spencer and North of bearing fake identities.
"Spencer Collins (CEO/CFO), Grace North (CTO) is fake person, work as support in telegram chat," wrote Leo99 in his grievance on Bitcoin forum BitcoinTalk.org. "Continually postpone solving all problems for the future or ignore messages."
A deeper look into IndoEx LTD's official filings with the UK Registrar office showed that it received a First Gazette Notice in November 2020 for not sharing details about its shareholders. The company responded to the authority with only one name, Collins Spencer, who holds 1200 shares, hinting that IndoEx is an individually-owned company.
The U.K. Registrar later struck off the notice against IndoEx LTD. Nonetheless, the exchange continues to operate without approval from the UK Financial Conduct Authority (FCA).
The research led to three key takeaways:
- The WEBD price pump-and-dump originated from one exchange called IndoEx, operating under a UK-registered entity IndoEx LTD.
- Collin Spencer, the only stakeholder in the company, does not exist anywhere on social media.
- IndoEx's Linkedin Profile boasts about having 10-50 employees, but only three of them are using the business-oriented social media service. All of them have hidden Linkedin profiles and are from Indonesia, not the UK.
Evidence so far points that IndoEx was instrumental in single-handedly pumping and dumping the WEBD token on Monday. The token was trading flat during the Tuesday session of June 15.
Finance Redefined: Puff, puff, pump on 4/20! April 16-21st
A new generation of crypto investors get taken for a ride as Aave makes some puzzling moves.
Loyal Finance Redefined readers:
Hi, I’m Andrew. My inestimable colleague Andrey, the previous compiler of this newsletter, is stepping away from Cointelegraph in order to build [REDACTED], leaving me to take over lettering the news. While I’m thrilled he’ll be keeping around the DeFi ecosystem, I’m also infuriated that there’ll be yet another gigabrain trading against me.
Also: journalists quitting their jobs to do DeFi stuff. Talk about top signals. While DeFi tokens and ETH prices in particular have largely rebounded from dispepsia-inducing lows, I remain antsy.
Nonetheless, the highlights of the week:
4/20 Haze It
In the 4/21 hangover today, a new crop of crypto investors are discovering some cruel market realities. Hopefully, they’ll learn to laugh about them.
Yesterday, the Dogecoin community cashed in on some of their growing (if likely destined to be short-lived) cultural capital, attempting a hostile “unofficial holiday” takeover of 4/20 — a social media push to snatch the date away from stoners and rebrand it as “Doge Day.”
To some degree, it worked: Elon Musk, the meme superstar who happens to run a few tech companies, ratioed some disbelieving Boomers, and noted celebrity sex tape participant Dave Portnoy himself bought a bag that prompty tanked in price. DeFi-ers shouldn’t care too much about the meme currency aside from its utility in predicting wider altcoin runs, but Dogecoin day did feature a few other pump-and-dump absurdities.
Happy #DogeDay2021 @blockfolio pic.twitter.com/qgpZLTRTSm
— Dave Portnoy (@stoolpresidente) April 20, 2021
Self-styled DeFi tokens like $SAFEMOON and $SHIB hit the zenith of multiweek pumps on 4/20, along with projects like $ASS following suit. The moonshots led to some remarkable on-chain stories of guppies growing into whales essentially overnight on paltry initial investments:
so this guy bought $shib for +/- 10eth 180 days ago
— UniHax0r ~ (@UniHax0r4000) February 1, 2021
guess how much it's worth rn?
4 fucking millionhttps://t.co/aCzfDrORDV
Then, as it always does, the other shoe dropped. At the time of writing, $SAFEMOON is down a whopping 41.95% on the day, $SHIB in the red 38.48%, and $ASS looks like ass.
Burj Khalifa charts for all these scam tokens.... $ass #safemoon $doge $shib pic.twitter.com/hzv7bgqyH3
— ⓗathor.chuck (@BloodyChuck) April 21, 2021
These pump-and-dumps stand out for two reasons: how little effort went into them, and how much interest they managed to attract anyway. SAFEMOON features a token burn and redistribution on every sale; classic pumpanomics offering little by way of novelty. SHIB’s utility is still in the formation stages, with a DEX and an “artist incubator” in the works (though they are donating… something? Somehow? To animal rescue organizations), and features a companion coin, LEASH, a synthetic rebasing DOGE that no one needs or asked for. I don’t know what ASS does and refuse to find out.
SAFEMOON in particular bears superficial similarities to the Bill Drummond money experiments like $XAMP and bonding curve ponzis like $TRIB that dominated late last year. I remember those for being fun; everyone knew that it was musical chairs that you played with real money, but dived into games with the zeal of kindergarteners anyway (XAMP’s case, the project emerged from a pseudonymous dev whose namesake is famous for literally burning piles of money — no one was trying to fool anyone else about how things would turn out). It was a string of absurd schticks acted out in what often feels like a fundamentally absurd space.
Safemoon, by contrast, has a slick marketing campaign underway that likely includes considerable PR heft (as a journalist I feel as if I can spot inorganic narratives; Google Safemoon’s news coverage and tell me what you see). Likewise, the sums of money made and lost in the bygone era of Drummond all of six months ago are anodyne compared to the sea of cash that lifted these shittokens on 4/20. It’s still fun and games — all a big joke, really — but the investors don’t seem to totally understand that.
At my most idealistic, I believe the mass adoption of DeFi could be as beneficial to the advancement of the human species as mass literacy; on days like 4/20, however, I think it’s an unusually efficient mechanism for parting fools from their money.
Scams Pump The Hardest Lesson 1:
— ∞ CO฿IE (@CryptoCobain) April 20, 2021
Scams will pump so high you will question your reality and wonder whether it is actually a scam.
- Fontase, 2013
Scams Pump The Hardest Lesson 2:
<redacted>
- Newton, 1687
From chapter 49 of Moby-Dick, “The Hyena”:
“There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke […] And as for small difficulties and worryings, prospects of sudden disaster, peril of life and limb; all these, and death itself, seem to him only sly, good-natured hits, and jolly punches in the side bestowed by the unseen and unaccountable old joker.”
I have endured pump-and-dumps. I have learned that, like Ishmael's god, the market often acts as predator cackling as it tenderizes your ribs. The best — and maybe only — way to stick around is to cackle right back, smile at the sea of red in your portfolio, and carry on.
I’d like to welcome the new crop of investors who have taken their first ride on the euthanasia rollercoaster. To you, my stimulus check-investing, Tik-Tokking friends! You’ve been hazed, you got through it, and I hope you hang in there. Avoid rebase games and remember that boring old 10% APY stablecoin farming is always an option.
DeFi is better when you can laugh about it.
What’s going on with Aave?
Perhaps the biggest story of the week somehow went largely unnoticed: money market and lending giant Aave is considering a move into social media.
The bizarre shift was first teased by Aave’s official Twitter account on Saturday:
What if there was a social media protocol built on top of a DeFi Protocol..?
— Aave (@AaveAave) April 17, 2021
I followed up immediately with Aave co-founder Stani Kulechov to confirm that the Tweet wasn’t the work of a ponderous intern celebrating 4/20 early. He gave me a short statement, one whose visionary heft raised more questions than it answered:
“At Aave we believe in a thesis that eventually interactions in web3 realm will become finance, whether its likes, sharing pictures or moments, everything will become user-owned value that can be empowered with Aave Protocol.”
I’m reminded of that tortured plotline in The Office where Dunder-Mifflin’s paper company sales website introduces social media features. How would it work, what synergy if at all does it have with decentralized lending, and, really, why?
Aave’s head of integrations, Bily Zeller, gave some additional background, implying that there would be a pay-per-post model in which interest on deposits could be used to post:
What if the cost of that tx represent a few seconds of interest on a double digits deposit?
— Marc '七 Billy' Zeller (@lemiscate) April 17, 2021
This doesn’t necessarily translate to the “posts-as-value” model that Stani laid out, however. At the moment, I’m skeptical: if Stani ever responds to my DMs I’ll be interviewing him to get more background. I look forward to being convinced.
Pivots to entirely new industries aside, the protocol is firing on all cylinders.
Yesterday, Stani teased an image of the money market with bolstered yields from Aave token distributions, part of testing for a liquidity mining program currently live on the Kovan testnet:
Kovan pic.twitter.com/JNX7xXBIZY
— stani.eth =(⬤_⬤)= (@StaniKulechov) April 20, 2021
Aave is already a core layer in many retail and protocol-level farming strategies; adding AAVE token rewards for lending and borrowing would supercharge TVL metrics. I’m somewhat concerned for token price (look at what governance token rewards did to CRV last year), but suspect the program could bolster the ecosystem considerably.
Bright, if sometimes puzzling days ahead for the protocol.
Other big headlines:
Coinbase insiders dump nearly $5 billion in COIN stock shortly after listing
After an edict to remain "mission focused," Coinbase executives have succeeded in making themselves a fortune.
Insider activity reports for Coinbase’s COIN stock indicate that multiple early investors and executives dumped billions in equity shortly after COIN’s direct listing, with at least one C-suite director cashing out their stake in the cryptocurrency exchange entirely.
Data from Capital Market Laboratories and confirmed by filings on Coinbase’s Investor Relations website shows a total of 12,965,079 shares sold by insiders, worth over $4.6 billion at COIN’s $344.38 per share Friday close.
Notable transactions include Coinbase CFO Alesia Haas selling all of her 255,500 shares at a price of $388.73, while CEO Brian Armstrong sold 749,999 shares in three transactions at various prices, netting a total of $291,827,966. He retains 300,001 shares worth over $1 billion.
Capital Market Laboratories' data did not indicate that any directors or insiders purchased additional shares, only sold.
The sales prompted jeering and amusement on social media, with many observers likening the sales to a classic “pump and dump” in which insiders and team members dump tokens into retail liquidity shortly after a listing.
lolol wtf pic.twitter.com/ezZx5F8ua9
— Dereck Coatney (@DereckCoatney) April 17, 2021
While early investors and executives looked to cash in, there are at least a handful of major buyers. Hedge fund manager Cathie Wood is placing a big bet on the exchange, having purchased over $350 million in shares for three different Ark ETFs.
Likewise, many Coinbase employees now have stake in the company, as 1,700 Coinbase staff were gifted 100 shares each as a “thank you” from the company.
Earlier this year, Coinbase was embroiled in a string of negative headlines relating to CEO Brian Armstrong's handling of a new policy that restricted focus on political and social issues at work. Armstrong insisted that the company remain "mission focused," and the company's mission includes a goal of becoming “the leading global brand for helping people convert digital currency into and out of their local currency.”
‘Wolf of Wallstreet’ Jordan Belfort Now Bullish on BTC, Says Crypto Asset Will Reach $100,000
Jordan Belfort, the self-proclaimed “Wolf of Wallstreet” has moved away from his bearish views on bitcoin and now predicts the crypto asset might reach $100,000. Belfort, who has reinvented himself as a motivational speaker and consultant, says bitcoin unlike company stocks is more about “pure supply and demand.” He adds that the crypto asset is […]