Crypto Being Crypto...

Yesterday we saw a classic inverted Bart. Clear as day. Almost a 5% difference from the peaks. Whenever the Bart man shows up people assume manipulation. After all, how many people would have panic sold at Bart’s hairline assuming we were going back down to $6k.
Other than the vague thrown out statement of manipulation, it’s pretty hard to definitively explain why a flash dip and flash pump occur, other than strong sell and then buy pressure of course. People may point to futures contracts expiring, or the news that broke yesterday that the Winklevoss twins had their ETF proposal rejected https://www.coindesk.com/winklevoss-brothers-bitcoin-etf-rejected-by-sec-for-second-time/, not to be confused with the CBOE version everyone’s waiting on.
Let’s not panic here. The main difference between the two is that the Winklevoss version is more manipulatable as the prices of Bitcoin come from only one exchange, Gemini, which the brothers own. The CBOE one uses an aggregated price of Bitcoin, so using multiple exchanges. One was easy to manipulate, the other one not so much.

Ultimately unless we operate a giant exchange we don’t have access to all the facts. We are trying to piece a puzzle together with only a few of the pieces. So, we have to say there’s likely a bit of everything going on, so sometimes crypto is just being crypto.
Let’s talk a bit about Ethereum today. Its volume has suddenly spiked to even overtake Bitcoins 24hr volume, yet there is as of recording no price activity either way. Strange. MEME.
Doing a bit of investigatory work. And by that, I mean, clicking on a website and scrolling a little bit. We can see where all the volume is coming from. A tether pairing from the EXX Hong Kong based exchange. Never heard of one of the most popular exchanges in the world? Accounting for 73% of all Ethereum trading. That sounds legit doesn’t it?
While I am not certain, this is almost certainly wash trading to create fake volume. And the reason an exchange would do that is to attract users by saying “Hey, you can buy loads of Ethereum on our exchange, we are very liquid. The order books are very thick.” Except their not, not for orders over $20k most likely. It’s fake volume.
EXX is hardly alone in this. There are plenty of Chinese rip off exchanges that both CoinMarketCap and LiveCoinWatch have recently listed. They seem super popular, but no ones ever heard of somehow. It’s even something that the more legit exchanges are possibly guilty of, but without access to more information, that’s just crypto being crypto.

Back to Ethereum, got side tracked there. At one point about a couple weeks ago the network was experiencing particularly high fees and congestion. A specific exchanges tokens were to blame, as well as Ethereum’s most popular decentralized application to date: Crypto Kitties, and a couple of Ponzi games. It’s still early days Cam, crypto is still the future, it’s just early days.
Ethereum’s next upgrade aimed to directly tackle the blockchains efficiency and fees dubbed Constantinople is currently being implemented but expected to go live within a few months. Still no update yet on when Ethereum will be hard forking over to a proof of stake model where you will no longer be able to mine Ethereum.
Lastly with a tiny bit of alt coin news we have Enjin, which had it’s main net launch today: https://blog.enjincoin.io/enjin-coin-live-on-the-mainnet-bc61b8930a77 Using a new type of token on the Ethereum network using ERC-1155. It is now ready for game developers to use Enjin and tokenize assets within their games. So who’s lining up to have crypto in their games? Clak Whatever.