A couple of days ago many traders that invest in cryptocurrency woke up to a nightmare.
All was fine the previous day some coins price going up others going down, the next day me and probably a few million other traders almost had an heart attack when opened Coin Market Cap (CMC) website and most of the Top 50 coins were falling in force from 10 to 30% with exception of Ethereum.
What did I do? well before I made any stupid move which could hurt my finances badly went to check the prices on Bittrex which is where I do all my trading except for Ethereum (ETH), noticed the prices were more or less the same as the previous day and ignored the situation thinking that CMC website was probably not pulling info correctly due to some maintenance or whatever, and this was my stupid move! You see, Coin Market Cap is probably the world's most used website that to check coin prices both in USD and BTC, many traders panicked and started selling most of their coins before losing more money, as the prices continued to go down, more traders started to sell and you can figure exactly where this ended, Ripple (XRP) took the biggest hit falling by around 40% in less than 24h leaving the traders that did not sold their coins on a bad financial position.
Life goes on and what goes down eventually goes up again. Since 100% of the money I have in exchanges came from my cryptocurrency mining I don't exactly feel that I lost something or anything, sadly can't say that for many people that invest their savings on these markets.
Now let's talk about the title of the post, a friend from work have told me that prices went down because Coin Market Cap had removed North Korea exchanges from their list, so I went to investigate this one better and found out that in fact wasn't a delisting of North Korea Markets but South Korea, wha.. wait a minute! why would anyone would want to remove the biggest market of Ripple (XRP) trading in the first place? this is where things start to stink... a lot!
Not sure if everyone is aware but in any type of business no decision is made in seconds and then implemented minutes after, there are reunions, discussions, presentations of positives vs negatives before a decision is made and then when a decision is made it takes at the very least hours or days to implement the new changes.
What I'm saying is there is no way someone at CMC was sitting at his\her desk and decided just like that ok let me delist South Korean Markets because (and this is exactly what CMC said the reason was) they influence the prices go up too much due to their high trading volume, and just flipped the switched to remove data from those markets which caused prices to go down around 20% from one second to another.
A decision like this takes days to discuss since it's such a big move, not to mention the responsibility that CMC has with its users, and then, there was no warning on their website, nothing on their Facebook. What I found was a single tweet on their Tweeter account (hours after the change) with the information:
"This morning we excluded some Korean exchanges in price calculations due to the extreme divergence in prices from the rest of the world and limited arbitrage opportunity. We are working on better tools to provide users with the averages that are most relevant to them."
As I was scrolling down the comments, obviously found a lot of angry people with comments like:
leannekera said: "You mean that because Korean demand has pushed up the price, you decided to try and put your finger on the balance and ignore 40% of the market for XRP. Because that doesn’t smell of market manipulation at all!" s
Onlyzineb went with: "Right, might be useful to notify people of things like this before or as you execute to avoid crashing the market, thanks."
ReinerMPS opinion was: "I think they were measuring their influence"
ItsLevalicious said: "Coinmarketcap Is supposed to show GLOBAL prices for cryptocurrencies - if you start excluding regions and exchanges, then that makes your service unreliable and untrustworthy."
Some users directly accused CMC of market manipulation:
ChrisCormpilas: "What a joke. A little late don't you think? Massive #marketManipulation happening here... I wonder how much the insiders made off of this "exclusion""
leannekera retweeted: "People are angry because this is blatant market manipulation"
CryptovolJake: "What they lost in trust they got back in large amounts of cash."
sulaimaan123 even created a poll: "Do you think this was a deliberate market manipulation ploy on the part of #Coinmarketcap?"
The poll results were:
85%Yes
07%No
08%Not sure
My personal opinion? There was no warning, no banner on the website, all was done silently with 0 alerts, well my guess is that some people from CMC staff are probably somewhat richer now!
So what do you guys think about this?
Source:
https://twitter.com/CoinMarketCap/status/950427463804481536
- CoinMarketCap