So I've been keeping track of various ICOs and in particular those ICO tokens that have hit the exchanges, and I noticed something odd. There's a ridiculous spike right as the token goes live on the exchange:
MCO: 1.9 BTC for an ERC20 token?
And this isn't the only occurence:
BAT: 1 BTC
SC: 1 BTC
NMR: 0.5 BTC
XEL: 1 BTC
Here are my thoughts for why this may be happening:
1) Sheer stupidity
It may be that some people either make mistakes or otherwise unknowingly buy a new coin/token for a ridiculous amount. However, I'm going to give all traders - even woefully uninformed traders - the benefit of the doubt. Anyone who has BTC today and are on an exchange should know its price, some history, and that it is the most valuable cryptocurrency by absolute value, by far. So I find this explanation unlikely.
2) Some kind of new listing practice
Could it be the exchanges setting some sort of baseline price for initial list? This is quickly disproven with the plethora of other currencies and tokens which do NOT have such a spike at the start of their listing. Besides, the exchange operators know that a) new coins/tokens won't be that valuable and b) I doubt it's in the exchange's interest anyway to intentionally skew their graphs and numbers that way. So that's not it...
3) Gaming the pricing system
Someone holding even 1 BTC and multiple exchange accounts can create a buy order at that ridiculously high price on one account and immediately fulfill it with a matching sell order on their second account. All they've lost is the exchange fee (less than 0.5%), but they may have gained an unfair advantage by artificially altering the market numbers, which may give back a profit of a lot more than 0.5%!
Obviously I'm leaning toward the most logical of the three: currency holders trying to game the system.
Here's some additional evidence for why this may be the case:
Does anything stand out?
MCO and XEL are showing % change is -100%!
If someone doesn't do their research for as little as 5 minutes and simply looks at those numbers, they'd think that for whatever reason those coins have completely crashed and this is a great opportunity to buy some now before the price goes up again.
So, relatively more people buy in the first 24 hours, driving up the (theoretically) natural price that the token would have (because you know how much you paid for it during the ICO).
That's what I think is happening.
(The only thing throwing off the artificial price game theory is that BTC-XEL shows 0 volume for that day zero spike, but maybe that's some kind of exchange artifact?)