(Sorry in advance if this seems like a stupid question, but I just started looking at the market and this is boggling me)
I don’t know if it’s just a kucoin thing, but I just started paying attention to their top gainers, and nearly all of them are unknown. They’ll have minimal activity, most of their prices are less than a dollar, and somehow thry shoot up 30%-100% in a matter of minutes (the current coin right now is eosc at 193%, for example). Most of them end up in the top losers section the next day.
What I wanted to know is, how is this happening? Are there pumps and dumps? How do so many people just decide to buy these coins all of a sudden? It would be different if a well known coin pumped all of a sudden, but like I said, I’ve never heard of most of these coins (yesterday, for example, the top coin had a donkey’s face on it, that I will swear I’ve never seen). What is happening here? Is this some kind of weird market manipulation that I don’t know about? I know there are influencers who shill coins, but they do this every day? Nearly ten coins every day? How do people fall for it?
Don’t trust the coins that have four digit APY returns in the weekly, it’s manipulation of numbers
That’s how it is. To move a small coin with very low liquidity, you don’t need that much trading volume – and therefore they can easily be pumped and dumped, especially by the creators which usually have huge bags.
Low market caps can pump with few millions
There certainly is market manipulation, well at least since May 2021…and what I’ve noticed is a lot of defi tokens seemingly come out of nowhere to be listed almost immediately on the major CEX’S. Binance, CDC, CB etc…as for the pumps and dumps, yes, it’s a concerted effort. I don’t see what else can make that happen.
The biggest gainer on kucoin is usually newly listed and pumping. However kucoin def has some older (prob dead) projects such as KAT that constantly pump and dump every few months it seems. Those are prob choreographed/planned.
New coins/tokens can pump very quickly on hype/manipulation/people buying into shitcoin lottery. But try to sell and you can find difficulties if there isn’t the liquidity. Essentially you are right to say pump and dump.
Don’t fall for those FOMO traps
Check out order books, sometimes a coin can be moved up quickly on an exchange and arbitrage bots will notice. Not saying it always happens like this. A small market cap can be pumped with unusual volume
Manupulation and low cap is the reason of coins coming out of nowhere shooting to top
Crypto in a nutshell.
Kucoin lists a ton of new/unknown/low MC tokens (shitcoins) compared to a lot of other exchanges, making them a go-to for US-based degens among others. So there is SOME actual appetite for these, especially when they are newer and just listed. Worth noting though that the wild spikes in price for a newly listed token are almost entirely driven by bots.
The order books for these tokens also have very low liquidity, meaning that it doesn’t take a whole lot of volume to spike or crash the price. Kucoin’s books are notoriously thin in general. Prime real estate for coordinated pump and dump schemes.
Speaking of, there’s also no reason not to suspect shady activity behind the scenes. Coordination between market makers, whales, devs/promoters and even the exchange itself. They could be manipulating their own books. Not saying they are, I’m saying there isn’t much stopping them.