YoBit Openly Exposes Its Own Price Manipulation

When a smaller coin experiences sudden jumps in price followed by a similarly dramatic slump, it can ruin its credibility as a reliable asset for its early adopters. This is apparently exacerbated by exchanges that participate in this behavior, as YoBit admitted to doing in a tweet.

https://twitter.com/YobitExchange/status/1050035464609124352

In case that tweet goes down, we’ll summarize it here. The exchange basically announced a pump of a random coin in 22 hours.

It also announced plans to pump a total of 10 Bitcoin into a random coin, distributing the pump to 1 BTC every few minutes.

The cryptocurrency that it decided to pump was “PutinCoin,” which seems to have no other merit than being a Bitcoin clone that bears Russian president Vladimir Putin’s name in it.

“The Putin coin is a cryptocurrency coin [sic] created to pay tribute to the people and the president of Russia. It was created and developed with the intention of supporting the vastly growing Russian economy, the market around it and even the economy across the Russian boarders [sic],” reads the coin’s whitepaper.

Fan reactions ranged from “no way” to “shame on you.” One particular follower reminded YoBit that the United States Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) issued an advisory revealing its intentions to investigate and prosecute any pump-and-dump schemes.

We have attempted to contact YoBit regarding this and have not received a reply.

However, we suspect that PutinCoin truly was a random choice, as the coin is nothing particularly inspiring. After the pump, the coin is now #1,115 in CoinMarketCap.

Its value rose shortly to 1,768 satoshis from a low of 118, ending up at press time at 301, almost three times its original value. The initial pump generated a trading volume of 129.43 BTC in a span of 40 minutes.

The behavior we observed using YoBit’s own data resembles pump-and-dump schemes we’ve tracked during our own independent investigations into groups that orchestrate similar activities earlier this year.

The pump itself did not play well for YoBit, with people asking CoinMarketCap to delist the exchange. So far, no reply has been given by the coin listing platform.

Coinigy was also confronted by its community and immediately responded with an announcement that it would possibly delist both YoBit and HitBTC.

“Due to overwhelming negative experiences as documented on social media and forums, among other reasons, HitBTC and YoBit are being considered for delisting from the Coinigy platform,” the company said in a tweet.

At this moment, Coinigy is looking for feedback from its users on whether this is the right decision.