Insider trading has become a hot topic in crypto circles following the recent conviction of the brother of the former head of cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase . The insider trading case at Coinbase is believed to be the first involving cryptocurrencies, but now another group of wallet addresses is under suspicion, with trading histories linked to the coin’s listing on Binance.
Conor Grogan, director of Coinbase, flagged the trading activity of several anonymous wallets in the past 18 months on Twitter . Minutes before the announcement of a number of tokens to be listed on Binance, these anonymous wallets allegedly bought these tokens that had not yet been listed. tokens, and then sell those tokens after the listing is announced.
The first such case was with the Rar token, where a wallet bought $900,000 of Rari seconds before the listing was announced , and dumped the tokens minutes after listing.
Another wallet starting with 0x20 bought about 78,000 ERN tokens between June 17th and 21st, and sold them immediately after the listing news came out. Another token that was bought and dumped was the TORN token, where one wallet bought hundreds of thousands of TORN before the tokens were listed and sold them immediately after the listing was announced.
A similar pattern also appeared before the RAMP token was listed on Binance. One of the wallets beginning with 0xaf bought 500,000 US dollars of tokens a few days before the listing of the coin, and after Binance announced the listing news Send those tokens to Binance within minutes and sell them for a profit of $100,000.
Another profit of $100,000 came from Binance’s listing of the GNO token, and the owner of the wallet sold it in the same way when the token was newly listed to make a profit.
These wallets made hundreds of thousands of dollars by virtue of this model of buying and selling tokens before they were listed on Binance. The accuracy of these transactions shows that the owners of the wallets have access to inside information about the listing of these tokens.
Grogan speculates that this may be due to unscrupulous employees related to the listing team who have detailed information about the listing of new loan assets, or traders who have discovered some kind of application programming interface (API) vulnerability or staging/ testing Deal leaked.
Binance recently announced a 90-day token sale policy for employees, prohibiting them or their loved ones from selling a new token within 90 days of its listing. Binance did not respond to media requests for comment.