Bitcoin Forum

I'll try to explain this situation.

When trying to trade with low liquidity tokens. It's usual to find wide spreads.

For example, I want to sell a token and the buying price is 30 satoshis and selling price is 20 satoshis.
I put a limited order to sell at 29, now the spread is between 20-29 and my order is the first.

The key point is the exchange historial. Here appears some finished trades at 25 satoshis.
And I say: OMG, this was not on the order book...  ??? ???

Then change my order to 25 satoshis, now the spread is 20-25.
Some trades appears at 22 satoshis.

Look like tricky!

Finally I decided to close the spread. Putted my order at 21 satoshis, now we are with 20-21 satoshis spread.
And... at this point no more operations happens in the market.

Is this a bot? Is this the exchange trying to cheat users?

Thanks for your help!

Edit: it happened me in few medium-small exchanges.

It's better to just spill out the name of the exchange. There are some exchanges that has fake orderbooks and that's probably what you experienced.   It's not a rare occasion for many of these less popular exchanges.

It happend to me in IDAX and P2PB2B.

And if your answer is: just leave that exchanges...
I can't, because I have some rare tokens to exchange and are only listed on that exchanges.



Thanks for your answer

Probably it is a Bot.  The transaction is too fast for you to see.  There is also a possibility that exchange is manipulating the sales but it is more probably the owner of the token you are trading.  I also experience this kind of stuff but I just ignore it since I cannot do anything about it. I just set my sell order and leave it until the order is fulfilled.

Probably, but this let me ask myself: why? What did they win with that?

Maybe there is a pump-and-dump group behind using a bot trying to manipulate the price. And tell their members that they are indeed can control the price of this coin. Just simply some preparation for them to make it looks like they've holding majority of this coin and then one day push the price again followed by a big dump. Or just exchanges as well, its possible because we don't see what's going on from behind. There's a lot of things that can really happen that is hard to explain. You can event suspect that the project itself is doing some manipulation as well. There are so many angles to look, IMHO.

You're right. So many possibilities.

Thank you very much!!

Honestly, this happens to me sometimes on liquid exchanges like Binance when I'm trying to get filled at the spread. It's just a low liquidity, low volume market. This effect is amplified with the tokens you're trading.


Beggars can't be choosers. If you're bagholding low volume coins, you can either wait on the other side of a wide spread and hope.......or dump. That's why there's someone with bids at 20 satoshis, because a 10 satoshi spread actually justifies the risk of bagholding an illiquid token.

where do you trade?
because I've also experienced something like you, and it was on a hotbit exchanger, and as we know hotbits are known for fake volumes, that's because of bots, and how the bots work as you see and I experience, a little annoying actually.
hopefully it can be a lesson for others too.