It appears that a good number of crypto enthusiasts and investors aren’t happy about how Coinbase has been conducting business of late. Case in point is the latest listing of a new crypto on the platform. The coin, named 0x (ZRX) has surged up by around 40% since its listing on the crypto exchange yesterday. However, there seems to be some reservations surrounding the listing event.
According to data analyzed, the coin is shown to have already been on a sharp uptrend just minutes before Coinbase announced its official listing on the trading platform, inviting fears of possible insider trading. This surge has led to various quarters of crypto investors on the internet alleging possible foul play.
What Explains This?
However, that doesn’t erode the fact that most serious crypto traders are always on the lookout for possible market changes that mean money to them. That’s could effectively explain why there was an uptick of asset movement and ZRX trading right before the listing announcement was made public by Coinbase.
For one, it’s a known fact that there are traders who use trading bots to scout for actionable intel in the crypto world, much of which is obtained from exchange servers. If someone used such a bot to scan Coinbase’s servers and noticed the addition of a new crypto, they could have jumped in and invested in the crypto expecting to reap from the imminent price surge.
It’s also an obvious fact that whenever a new cryptocurrency is listed on a popular exchange platform like Coinbase, its price shoots up by a huge margin. That could perhaps explain the 40% price gain for ZRX right after it was listed on the exchange.
The Bot Story
Bots have become popular in the crypto world. In fact, there’s a bot that gives free trading tips on twitter. Such bots only send their signals via social media. One of such is Altcoinnotify that disseminates its signals via twitter. However, there are others that are commercialized and more advanced that they can actually initiate trades on their own when they spot a strong trading position on behalf of the account owner.
There are also some advanced machine intelligence bots that can place trades on behalf of the account owner, but the owner has to part with a monthly subscription fee ranging between $20 and $99. Some traders even opt to program their own bots, and to some good programmers, that’s something that takes just a few days to set up.
In the case of ZRX, the bot must have notified the traders of the crypto’s addition by scanning Coinbase’s API, prompting the traders to move fast and exploit the apparent advantage of a heads up.