An Ethereum wallet purchased more than $400k worth of tokens, just hours prior to the exchange making the list for tokens to be considered for listing, public. That isn’t a problem in itself, but apparently the wallet appeared to be only buying the specific tokens that were present on the list.
As much as unethical trading is discouraged on such platforms, it does not seem to stop users from taking advantage of the crypto platforms’ weak security frameworks. Trading activity of wallets are publicly available to maintain a transparent flow of transactions. Therefore, some users were quick to point out the underhanded transactions dealt by this particular wallet. It certainly points to questionable trading practices as the wallet seemed to pick only those tokens present in Coinbase’s upcoming list. Just 3 minutes before Coinbase published the list of tokens under consideration for listing, the wallet owner seemed put his purchases to a halt. Now how, you may ask, does this affect the wallet’s ill-begotten gains?
You see, right after Coinbase published its list of said tokens on 11th of April at 9:05pm, ET – the particular assets had an immense surge in value. The tokens bought at $400k were now worth about $572k, giving nearly a 42% return on the wallet’s investments. So in less than 24 hours the wallet owner not only built a portfolio of colossal value, but was also able to receive a sizeable return on his shady investments.
The tweet that brought the unethical trading to light, said that the wallet purchased six tokens from Coinbase’s list before it was made public. You can read the full thread here.
Found an ETH address that bought hundreds of thousands of dollars of tokens exclusively featured in the Coinbase Asset Listing post about 24 hours before it was published, rofl pic.twitter.com/5QlVTjl0Jp
— Cobie (@cobie) April 12, 2022
The twitter user’s screenshots showed purchases of Kromatika (KROM), DappRadar (RADAR), Indexed (NDX), DFX Token (DFX), RAC (RAC), and Paper (PAPER). As the value of the listed tokens surged right after Coinbase’s blog post, the individual prices of the mentioned tokens went up by about 40-60%. Even though Coinbase’s list only made public of what it is considering to be officially listed later, a price surge is to be expected. The official listing has not been published yet, so transactions made based on the considerations alone may turn out to be decisions made in haste.
