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发帖数: 9872 | 1 https://themerkle.com/who-is-spoofy/
Most cryptocurrency enthusiasts will agree that people manipulate the
Bitcoin market. Even though Bitcoin should be all about a free market, the
rich and wealthy -known as whales- are in a position to muck around with the
price as they see fit. There are rumors circulating about an entity called
“Spoofy”, who is -or are- manipulating the price of Bitcoin. Bitfinex and
Tether got tangled in this story somehow as well.
MEET SPOOFY, THE WHALE OF ALL BITCOIN WHALES
Anyone who has kept an eye on cryptocurrency price charts will notice there
is a fair bit of volatility. In some cases, these price swings can be
explained due to some major news breaking. Other times, these market
movements are seemingly entirely random, which is a bit more difficult to
explain. It now appears the entity known as “Spoofy” may be responsible
for these market movements on a regular basis. This entity seems to favor
the Bitfinex exchange.
Bitfinex ran into a fair bit of issues over the past 18 months. First of all
, they got hacked and lost a few dozen millions worth of customer funds. To
counter that issue, the company issued IOU tokens and reduced user balances
to make up for the missing money. These tokens were eventually redeemed not
too long ago. One peculiar aspect about that process was how the company
successfully redeemed over 90% of all outstanding IOU balances
simultaneously. No one knows where the money came from, but a lot of users
shrugged it off and moved on.
A few months ago, Bitfinex was one of many exchanges caught up on banking
issues. Their Taiwanese banking partner could not process USD transfers due
to insufficient KYC and AML measures. Those issues have been resolved as
well without as much as an official explanation by the company. Both of
these issues were resolved quickly but without any proof of how they were
addressed. This is not all that uncommon, but it is may have been a prelude
to something bigger going on behind the scenes.
Spoofy is a trader -or group of users- who mainly operate on Bitfinex. They
place large bids for Bitcoin, which are used to manipulate the price. In
most cases, this has the desired effect. If the price goes beyond their
initial target, they immediately put up sell orders for $2 million or more
to push the price down again. Sounds like market manipulation. The reason
this group is known as “Spoofy” is because they often place orders which
are never intended to execute in the first place.
The manipulation is done through a technique called “spoofing.” This is
where traders place buy or sell orders with no intention of actually
executing them. Such tactics could be used to manipulate traders and the
market in general. If the price is falling, and traders see a 1000 BTC
support buy order, the price will most likely bounce up in reaction. This
works the other way as well, if the price is rising and users see a 1000 BTC
sell order the price will most likely retract.
This is exactly how a mystery trader or a group of traders have been placing
orders on Bitfinex. Bitcrypto’ed provides the below video as evidence,
what you are looking for is large orders (900-5000 BTC) being placed and
never executed.
A perfect example of one such order is at 39 seconds, where you can clearly
see a 909 BTC order that is sitting there only for manipulation. If you keep
watching, when the price rises and 909 BTC order disappears and a ~700 BTC
order appears at a slightly higher price, aiming to push the price higher.
You may think that this is a fair way of trading because at the end of the
day, Bitcoin markets are full of manipulation and deception. However, “
spoofing” was made illegal in the United States under the Dodd-Frank Wall
Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act passed in July 21, 2010. As a
result, it is Bitfinex’s responsibility to sanction the traders responsible
for the manipulation.
There is further evidence that this group of traders is also manipulating
the market on GDAX but with much smaller orders. By the look of things, if
the orderbook on Bitfinex keeps flashing multi million dollar buy and sell
offers for a few seconds at a time, the exchange may see some scrutiny from
regulatory entities. After all, there is no reason why a user would need to
play with thousands of BTC for any other purpose than market manipulation.
Sending false signals to traders -either to push the price up or down- is
not uncommon in the financial sector. In most cases, people -or trading bots
- will gladly execute on those signals but they may regret doing so pretty
quickly. Placing asks or bids for your own bitcoins is apparently illegal in
the United States. With most exchanges not being regulated too tightly,
issues like these are still tolerated. You would need a lot of money to pull
this off on the Bitfinex exchange.
According to the original Medium post outlining the existence of Spoofy, the
trading group has up to $60 million on the exchange. Why anyone would keep
that amount of money in an exchange is beyond belief, though. Most people
would not trust Bitfinex -or other exchanges- with more than $5,000 worth of
fiat currency or Bitcoin. This information is based on the findings of one
user who has been analyzing Bitcoin price charts on Bitfinex. That being
said, there does appear to be some kind of market manipulation afoot.
It also appears the Bitcoin Cash distribution provided more evidence to
verify the existence of Spoofy. Bitfinex acknowledged some entities were
manipulating the Bitcoin price during the fork, which is why those traders
did not receive their BCH tokens. Someone traded around 24,000 BTC in shorts
at that time. It also appears this manipulator is active in other markets,
including Ethereum Classic and Ethereum. This is a very interesting case,
and it is well worth checking out all of the evidence posted on Medium. |
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