Original author: wale.moca, Azuki Researcher

Original translation: TechFlow

I researched and checked over 12 airdrops and found out that Whales Market is manipulating you.

Whales Market is a website where you can trade tokens and airdrop credits before the token TGE.

Basically a pre-market OTC trade where you can create buy and sell quotes.

For example: the token $BLOCK is provided by Blockgames, and many people will have received an allocation of tokens due to airdrops, or they invested in private rounds.

In theory, they own a certain amount of $BLOCK even before the TGE. However, they cannot trade it on exchanges because the tokens do not exist yet.

This is where Whales Market comes into play.

On Whales Market you can sell your tokens OTC. In principle, you sell your rights to your tokens at a certain price (regardless of how high the actual price of the TGE is).

After TGE, within 24 hours: Seller receives the agreed amount. Buyer receives tokens.

In the past, many of the most hyped tokens have traded here before their TGEs. I’m sure you’ve seen posts like this on Twitter that created a lot of hype around these tokens:

But if you look at pre-market trading on past declines, you'll quickly realize that the prices paid there were sometimes significantly higher than the "true" market price of TGE.

I analyzed 12 airdrop tokens:

Big price difference right? But why? The team (and associated investors) have an interest in driving up the price of the token before it goes public.

A 10-30% drop in the token’s value after listing can be attributed to speculation, but a drop of more than 50% is suspicious.

For example, $BLOCK had some suspicious transactions. The wallet bought two pending orders at prices well above the "floor price" after receiving funds from Binance, with zero previous trading activity. Fun fact: the wallet they bought from also had no previous activity. I'm not ZachXBT (an on-chain detective), so I didn't dig deeper.

As always, capturing alpha is all about paying close attention and not letting the hype convince you to do stupid things like buying when valuations are high or letting FOMO get the better of you. Be especially careful with tokens with low pre-market volume as they are more susceptible to manipulation.

Whales Market is not the culprit, quite the opposite: the service they provide is very useful.

It's the vested interests out there who are building momentum for you, or if you can, take advantage of it, after all, anyone can list and sell there.

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