Well, that was a hoot.
Last month a dedicated curator in the VYB tribe decided to dump its VYB holdings. 26 days ago the #VYB whale dropped a transaction to unstake 818,524 VYB.
VYB has a bizarre cooldown structure that involves 25 transactions in 25 days. So, for the last 25 days, dumped 32,740 VYB a day on the market.
This put a major downward pressure on VYB. The dumping event pushed the price of VYB to zero.
As I write this post. #hive-engine reports that VYB has a supply of 10,708,396 tokens that trade at $0.00003 for a marcap of $321. I suspect that the price will pop now that the dumping is through.
VYB triggers on the #proofofbrain keyword. As I understand the token was created in protest of whales who monopolized #POB through self-votes.
As I understand token does not pay on self-votes. I have not tested this idea.
The rewards for VYB come in staked form. This means that HE accounts that do not regularly unstake their coins end up building a modest nest of VYB.
The VYB Richlist shows that the token has one of the most equitable distributions of all the tribal tokens. There are only a few whales and a large number of VYB dolphins.
I happen to have over 100K VYB in my primary account. I guess that makes me a VYB orca. I acquired an additional 25K VYB last month for side projects.
It appears that the account was the primary beneficiary of the VYB fire sale. The voting trail for
shows that it does nothing but upvote the daily
burn post. The new whale is burning all of its earnings! This is great for the tribe.
The term "burn" involves transferring tokens the account.
As I write, the account held 13,744 free VYB and 125,328 staked VYB.
I should note. The account uses its HIVE and HBD rewards to buy and burn undervalued HIVE Engine tokens. After publishing this post. I will burn 6,295 VYB which should bring
's VYB holdings to over 20K.
A Whale Capitulation
An event where a market maker dumps a huge load of stock is called a "capitulation." I asked Night Cafe to generate the image of a whale swimming through burning seas as a #meme to signify a whale capitulation.
Conclusion
The recent experience on VYB highlights one of the dangers that whales pose to the HIVE ecosystem.
A whale can obliterate a tribe when it dumps its tokens.
I think that VYB still has good fundamentals. It has one of the most equitable distribution of coins on the market. So, I think that VYB will survive.
I would say that it is a good time to buy VYB, but there just isn't a lot of free VYB on the market; so buying will be tricky.