smartcoin：
are you updating your website now? when will the work done? It seems like the reason of panic sell today.
First off, it wasn't a panic sell. I watched it happen. Repeatedly over a fairly short period of time, someone very rapidly bought his way through lots of pre-set sale lots, none of which had particularly large amounts of SMC. This was done so quickly via some sort of automated mechanism or "buy bot" that coinmarket.io couldn't even keep up with the display of sale lots, only the current price. In other words, the display would show lots from, for example 11xxx down to 9xxx but the lots being sold were at 7xxx. You could only see the actual price in the Buy and Sell boxes.
The result was that the only remaining lots for sale were quite inexpensive and it appeared as if there had been a run. That caused some people who believed there HAD been a run to lower their prices considerably and then the process repeated itself. As I said, I watched it happen twice and I think it probably occurred a few more times. In the end, someone with automated buying software managed to get a nice sized chunk of SMC for a deep discount. And because of my pre-set sell orders, I ended up with a bunch more SMC at prices I never thought I'd see. So yay for me, I guess.
I had a series of preset buy triggers set across fairly broad range and they all triggered in seconds. Here's the one that had a set at 7500 and then 7006. Both were triggered in less than 20 seconds yet there were many orders in between. Same thing for 2 other sets I had.
Buy Tue Feb 18 04:58:34 499.25 SMC 0.00007006 0% 0.03497746 BTC
Buy Tue Feb 18 04:58:15 331.83812547 SMC0.00007500 0% 0.02488786 BTC
Nobody types that fast
Secondly, you think that an unfinished website is something that causes a panic sell? Egad, man; get a grip.
You don't buy a coin to get it to go down you sell a bunch. Is this what you are saying? I noticed some interesting things going on that day as well. There was a certain exchange that was hemorrhaging SMC at ridiculously low prices well before the drop at coinmarket.io. It was an arbitrage opportunity gone bad. They dumped the crap out of it on coinmarket because they bought it for much less than half price. I saw SMC going for less than 0.00004000 BTC and it was selling for high 9000 satoshi on coinmarket.io. And I was already late to the party, thousands had already been sold at 2000 satoshi and lower. I did buy a bunch myself until I ran out of capital but I did not sell a single Smartcoin, I'm still well in the money on that deal right now. Loose exchanges sink ships. Up until 30 minutes ago you could still buy thousands of SMC for 0.00006220 BTC each.
edit: over 2000 SMC @ 0.00006500 BTC less than 10 minutes ago...
edit2: over 3000 SMC @ 0.00006220 BTC around an hour ago...
Sorry, it was late and I was quite tired when I wrote that. I was also a little amped on the adrenalin of having witnessed such a subtle market manipulation. Regardless, I definitely didn't explain myself well. Let me try to clarify.
In answer to your question; yes, you can actually depress the price of a coin buy buying in, providing you are able to push the bid prices down, which I believe is what happened here.
Buy and Sell orders that night were (and still are) very low volume. Each order may even be as small as a fraction of an SMC. So if one just looks at the number of bids (instead of the buy quantity each bid asks for) it looks, at a glance, like there are a lot of people trying to buy a lot of SMC. In fact, the overall quantity of coins bid is low. As I write this now, the some total of bids is about 3 tbc and the top bid is 6900. Last night I saw it at around 1.2 btc. That's a lot of money for me but is chump change to big movers in the crypto markets.
Volume that evening was similar - lots of bids for not a lot of SMC. I don't know what the total was at the time but I have to assume it was comparable as our volume hasn't had very many huge fluctuations, at least that I'm aware of. The most important difference on that night is that the top bid was in the 12xxx range.
So, by selling into ALL of the bids from the top price (12xxx) down into the 3000's (or possibly lower as I had my own lowest buy triggers set down there but I don't actually know how low he went), he probably averaged out paying in the 5xxx range per SMC. Once he had made his first round of buys, 2 things happened:
1. He startled people into dropping their ask prices since it looked at first blush like a panic sell. Remember, the buys were happening so fast that Coinmarket couldn't even display the bid and ask lists correctly. The only way to see the current bid or ask was to look at the price under each box - the order list itself lagged significantly. Anyway, with people seeing asks down in the 3xxx's or lower, new asks dropped very quickly. He then bought those SMC, in turn, in subsequent mass buys.
2. The second thing he did is the most significant. He managed to cut the price of SMC almost in half from the 12xxx where it stood before this campaign to the 6xxx to 7xxx where it stands today. Since that night, he's been able to buy more at his leisure as the price slowly rises again. Let's guess that at this point he's looking at average costs per SMC in the 5xxx to 6xxx range. As the price reverts to it's former supported level of 12xxx, he'll be able to pull of an easy doubling of his money. And, I suspect, he'll be selling some off as it goes up both to take profits and to keep the market moving.
A few other reasons I think this is what happened:
First and most significant is that there was no reason for a panic sell to happen at all. I mean, there had been plenty of encouraging news recently and no bad news at all.
Secondly, while this spree was happening, there were several points where the total of bids was miniscule compared to the total asks - I mean like there were a total of 4 or 5 bid orders and still an entire off-the-bottom-of-the-page list of asks. That is far, far different than I've ever seen it on SMC or any other coin. During the recent large run up and subsequent pullback of Doge, for example, there was nowhere near the imbalance - going up or down - that I saw in SMC that night. So people were just seeing the bids, assuming SMC had crashed, and selling into his hands.
Thirdly, we just don't have a large enough volume of traders to have caused such a huge decline to happen so quickly - almost instantly, really. I mean, even if every single trader was online and watching the market at the moment the whole thing started I doubt we would have seen as many sales in as short a time as we did.
Fourth, I also suspect that he had seeded the bids with his own orders to help the bid list look fatter than it really was and then cancelled those bids as he started his buying spree.
Finally, it's something I'd consider doing to a coin I cared nothing about if I had the means. What can I say? I can appreciate the beauty of a good scheme. Notice I didn't say scam, as this all falls within the rules of the exchanges. Anyway, if that's what happened, it's pretty ingenious.
My own caveat:
It is absolutely possible that there was someone with significant holdings who, for whatever reason, decided to liquidate his holdings regardless of the price. And I know Occam's Razor suggests that this simpler explanation is the correct one but...after watching it happen in real time, it just doesn't feel right to me. Anyone doing that would have to know what the effect on the price would be. Why take money out of your own pocket by dumping like that? Still, it is the simplest explanation. I just don't think that's what happened.
And to be clear, I absolutely DO NOT think it was an organic "panic" sell scenario even though that is a possibility, though in my eyes, the least likely one.
I hope I presented my theory more lucidly.
As for the scenario you saw on another market, I'd love to know more about it. Sounds like an arbitrager's dream
