Big success stories of “newcomer” crypto exchanges still keep us wondering whether it’s just pure luck or a result of manipulative actions. This time we decided to find out how BigONE exchange managed to score an impressive 6,300,000% rise of BTC/USDT trade volume in just 3 days. 

Overview

Founded on June 24, 2017, by a well-known Chinese Bitcoin investor Li Xiaolai, BigONE still seems to have a lot of mystery behind it. The average daily volume of BTC/USDT, ETH/USDT, and BCH/USDT was less than 1 BTC since the first trading day of January 23, 2018. For almost 5 months its daily trade volume did not exceed 15 BTC when suddenly it magically hit 401 BTC on June 21, and this little-known crypto exchange was in CMC’s Top-3! What is more, now BigONE has a daily trade volume of 221.9M which is 2.3 times higher than Bittrex(94.5M) and 4.5 times than Poloniex (48.5M). Coincidence? We do not think so.

Our team overviewed BigONE and found out that overall there are 82 cryptocurrency listings in it. Also, this crypto exchange applies the RAM Real Trading, meaning that it is selling its computing power to everyone. We as well analyzed BigONES’s community engagement and its official chat group has 35323 members, its Twitter account has 10105 subscribers, (however, only 120 likes), also only 500 subscribers on Facebook and 154 on Steemit.

Chart Volume Pattern Analysis

There was conducted a chart volume pattern analysis on daily charts of 4 major pairs. It let us get closer to getting to know how 63,000 times rise of BTC from 2 BTC on June 20th to 51K BTC on June 23 happened. We noticed that the recurrent daily trading activity is always starting and ending at the same time every day. Moreover, with the help of marketing analytical service Alexa.com we saw that there were not that many visitors who BigONE hit the record numbers. This indicates that the crypto exchange was modifying its trade volumes to make a false impression of high liquidity. 

Historical Trade Data Analysis

Another analysis was made based on BigONE’s historical trade data. Not surprisingly there were discovered a lot of trades of equal size with 4 to 6-second intervals which, of course, are indicators of volume manipulations. Thus, the only explanation of such an extreme jump (from 149.5 BTC in May to over 751,000 BTC in June) in monthly volume for BTC/USDT is that BigONE is manipulating its volume by wash trading. 

Marketing Analysis Of Data From Open Sources

Our final marketing analysis included data from open sources: daily trading volume on CMC, unique users, traffic, and social media activity. It showed that even disregarding the fact that top exchanges have more users than BigONE, its trading volume is still a few times higher. We also discovered that Direct Visits, Referral Traffic from CMC, CandyOne, Feixiaohao and Organic Search are the main traffic sources for BigONE. What conclusion can we draw from this information? Right, that company does not spend money on Paid Marketing or for organic community building. BigONE’s social media accounts might have subscribers and followers, but they certainly lack engagement including likes, reposts, retweets, comments, etc. 

Summing Up

All in all, BigONE’s trading volume is much higher than that of other large exchanges like Bittrex and Poloniex; however, it has a pretty weak community activity which makes this all a fascinating case. Curious how numbers and simple observations helped us to get to the bottom of this mysterious BigONE’s success? 

Check the whole article and do not forget to contribute your thoughts and ideas to the global crypto community to help us get rid of fraud of exchanges and finally make this industry mature!