Yesterday, Sunday, January 17th, 2021, for a few minutes the cryptocurrency Incent was in second place on CoinMarketCap by market capitalization, ahead of Ethereum even.
In fact, even now on Incent’s chart on CoinMarketCap (CMC), it is noticeable that yesterday in five minutes its market capitalization went from $516,000 to over $78 billion, only to return to $840,000 after about an hour.
Thus to all effects yesterday for about an hour Incent (INCNT) was the second-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization on CoinMarketCap, but not on CoinGecko for example. Why?
Market capitalization is actually just a trivial technical calculation that is obtained by multiplying the number of tokens in circulation by the price of a single token.
For example, on CoinGecko, the circulating supply for Intent is not specified, so the market capitalization has not been calculated either, and the price yesterday ranged from $0.07 to $0.18.
On the other hand, on CMC the circulating supply is about 46 million INCNT, and with a current price of about $0.02, it has an updated market capitalization of about $860,000.
Already from this data, it is clear that something does not add up, given the significant difference in the price of the same token, INCNT, between two aggregators that should indicate more or less the same data.
What happened to the cryptocurrency Incent (INCNT) yesterday
The explanation is that CoinMarketCap and CoinGecko have different sources from which to acquire INCNT’s market price, since the former gets its data from Folgory, while the latter from Waves.Exchange.
Moreover, the fact that they have only one source makes the data easily manipulable.
It is enough to note that the trading volume of INCNT in BTC on Folgory yesterday was only $217, while on Waves.Exchange it was $5,413.
With such a laughable trading volume it is very easy to manipulate the price by placing buy or sell orders at exorbitant prices.
In fact yesterday on CMC the price of INCNT went from $0.01 to $1.703 in five minutes, an incredible 17,000,000% gain. After an hour it returned to $0.018.
Given the insignificant volumes, this was probably a manipulation, because it is hard to believe that it could have been a mistake, given the size of the difference. In other words, someone probably managed to buy all the INCNT tokens for sale on Folgory, and, after having cleaned up the order book in this way, loaded new buy and sell orders from scratch at exaggerated prices. As a result, trading prices were crazy for an hour, and market capitalization also soared.
It would have been sufficient for CMC to average the price on Folgory with that on Waves.Exchange, perhaps in proportion to volume, for this not to happen.
