Anyone who has been in the crypto space for a while will be familiar with the term whale. These guys are the ones with seemingly endless sums of money and can manipulate markets a market as they see fit. While spending time tracking some whales it has come to light that many whales use their influence to help their friends achieve whale status.
One of the ways that this is done is through the use of sell walls and scaring cheap coins out of minnow. How this works is pretty simple. Whales know that the biggest fear for a minnow is to lose 20-30% on any trade, and would rather bail before things got any lower. They also know that most minnow fear sell walls because they fear it might cause a price dump and this is where the game is played.
Say our local whale ( BIll ) wants to help his buddy get into a coin that was recently released on an exchange but didn't have the best of entries available. Bill will tell his buddy ( Carl ) hey I will be putting up a sell wall at X price have your buy order set 10-15% below that. Bill goes and places his sell wall 20% below the lowest asking price and madness ensues.
Here is a quick example of what the order book now looks like:
If you look closely there is now a massive gap between previous sell orders and the where the wall is placed. What happens next is where the money is made. All of the sale order that had been on edge and losing patience now see that a bigger seller is trying to get out, so it becomes a race to the bottom and the buy orders begin to get filled relentlessly causing a cascading red candle.
This candle forms because everyone wants out of what they presume to have been a bad investment. So now carl who has his buy order set 10-15 below the wall is having his order filled for 30-40% cheaper then what the books where before the games were started. Carl will buy more then what he intends to keeplong-termm because what happens next is how the risk free money is generated.
After they have filled there bags with the cheaper coins the sell wall is released and the order has a massive chasim to be filled. Those who have panic sold are now in a dilemma, they have just sold a token they like trying to swing trade it but now face a situation where the coin may return to it previous height shorty. What happens is a flurry of buy start coming in, so carl can take advantage of this and sell the excess coins he purchased all the way back up to the price of the coin before the manipulation started and dropping the his average cost way down.
Bill has now assisted Carl in attaining coins for cheap and they both can move on to the next coin and continue the same scheme.