Opinion by: Tracy Jin, Chief Operating Officer, MEXC
Market manipulation is everywhere and yet nowhere to be seen. It is an invisible threat affecting crypto and traditional markets, leaving ordinary traders counting the costs. Sometimes, manipulation is obvious — illiquid tokens being pumped high before being dumped just as fast — but often, it’s subtler and more challenging to detect.
What’s more concerning is that these schemes are no longer the domain of rogue whales or amateur pump groups. Signs increasingly point to highly organized, well-funded networks coordinating activities across centralized exchanges, derivatives platforms, and onchain ecosystems. As these actors grow in sophistication, their threat to market integrity expands exponentially.
A tale as old as time
Market manipulation is as old as markets themselves. In ancient Greece, a philosopher named Thales of Miletus used his knowledge of weather patterns to predict a bumper olive harvest, quietly leasing all the olive presses in the region at a low rate before the season started. Then, when the harvest came in, and demand for presses spiked, he rented them out at inflated prices, pocketing the difference.
For a more recent historical example, albeit still 300 years in the past, see the South Sea Company bubble in which company directors dumped shares at peak prices, leaving regular investors rekt. Or the Dutch tulip bubble of a century earlier.
Market manipulation has existed in crypto since the first exchanges came onstream around 2011. Those who were around back then may recall the pump-and-dump schemes on the BTC-E exchange orchestrated by a notorious trader called Fontas. Or they might remember Bear Whale, whose 30,000 BTC sell wall crashed the market at a time when total daily trading volume was less than $30 million — for all of crypto combined. While not technically market manipulation, it showed how easily one individual could move the crypto market.
Fast forward to today, and crypto is a multi-trillion dollar asset class, rendering manipulation of large-cap assets virtually impossible for solitary whales. But when a group of…
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