The desire to make a quick buck and the lack of focus on the fundamentals of individual projects is becoming the reason by which many cryptocurrency investors suffer huge losses. This is evidenced by the latest Chainalysis report, which presents brutal numbers.
High losses due to manipulation
According to a report published on February 16 by analyst firm Chainalysis, in 2022 alone, the losses of cryptocurrency investors who became victims of potential “pump and dump” schemes could amount to as much as $4.6 billion.
Recall that this modus operandi involves the creation of coins, as a rule, without any coverage or even special features. On their basis, marketing campaigns are created to lure investors by misleading them. At a later stage, this triggers a huge hype and final FOMO. During it, taking advantage of inflated prices, the token issuer secretly dumps its own reserves on the market.
In order to expose this kind of project, analysts took a look at all the tokens that, thanks to BNB Chain and Ethereum, appeared on the market in 2022. More than 9,900 of them were classified as potential manipulation.
Cryptocurrencies facing manipulation
According to data released by Chainalysis, as many as 264 of these tokens could be behind the launch of only one creator. What is extremely interesting is how the team of analysts was able to obtain this kind of data. To do so, Chainalysis, considered that if a token already had a minimum of 10 swaps and four days of trading on decentralized exchanges in the week preceding its launch, it became suspect.
Among the 1.1 million coins released to the market, in the time frame captured by the study, as many as 40,500 met these criteria. In response to this data, another aspect was pointed out. This was the obvious drop in the value of the coins in question by a minimum of 90%, and this within the first week of its official release. The result was that as many as 24% of the projects were classified as frauds.
Margin of error for Chainalysis report
Further data indicated that as few as 445 individuals or teams could be behind any suspicious tokens. Collectively, they made close to $30 million in profits.
Nevertheless, Chainalysis explains that there may be errors among the above statistics:
“It is possible, of course, that in some cases the teams involved in launching the tokens did their best to create a healthy offering, and the subsequent price drop was simply due to market forces.”
