Topic: Evidence of Major Market Manipulation on Kraken Exchange Following ETF Announcem (Read 5103 times)

It's happened three times now on Kraken that the price will be stable in a $50 range for 2 hours and as soon as I fill an order then within 1 minute the price jumps $400 in the opposite direction. I've also tried layering my orders with stop losses and re-entries in three to four stacks. When I do this, the price on Kraken sometimes jumps instantly by $80 up to just below my final re-entry. This could be coincidence, but when there is zero price action on other major exchanges it becomes a ~2% probability of coincidence. And lastly, the reason I am sad is that whenever your margin trading equity for leveraged positions falls below 80% Kraken can liquidate you, and if it falls below 40% then they automatically liquidate you for up to 80% of your open positions. I think there is a conflict of interest because I have noticed that most of the time I get liquidated it is at the top or bottom of price action. This could be due to bots using margin analysis after the fact, but the liquidation level jumps every time the market changes from bearish to bullish. It's been twice that I've had a position drop to 50% equity refilled the equity only for it to liquidate at 60% or 80% equity, and when I do get liquidated, I get liquidated to 125% or 178% equity, despite customer support stating they only liquidate to get you to 100% equity. And when I say a $400 price change in 1 minute, I mean violent price action within 1 minute of my entry, taking place over several minutes with no scalping.

You can't make money trading just one single pair. Someone with dozens of millions' networth asked why Kraken has so many market makers, defining market makers as "market manipulators". It is because the bots can see all of your hidden orders before they get placed on the order books, and when Kraken wants to take profits they liquidate everyone's positions by up to 80% of their entry in order to bring them up to 100% equity (a.k.a. 178% equity)!

That said, it's my fault for underestimating the capabilities of hedge funds and bots... I should've hedged against euro or something. Just a bit bitter that I've lost my life savings, but perhaps my experiences can illuminate some traders. There's a miniscule chance that everything that's happened to me is coincidental. I'll let you calculate the odds.

That's a possibility but I am reminded of their recent action of having to close their doors to investors in Japan on claims of rising costs, but should one dig deeper, it begins to suggest, it was rather a calculated move to avoid the FSA efforts and crackdown to scrutinize exchanges offering services in the country, following the hack of $530 million-worth of the NEM cryptocurrency from the Coincheck exchange in January and the infamous Mt. Gox hack!

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.35099452

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Up to 25 fking minutes to close a position with proffit on kraken. I believe they fill the orders themselfs before you can fill yours. everytime when you want to cash in proffit it lags like crazy. tried up to forty times to close a position and when they close it expect it to be closed at the price that is not in your advantage even if the order got trough at market price, well market price will look different that what it;s on kraken or cryptowatch or bitcointick or anything else at the time they say the order was closed. Even the simple action of login in your account can take 4-5 attempts just so you can navigate to one page and then get another error. I'm done with kraken and i would advise anyone who plans to use kraken to try another trading site.

Using Poloniex's public API, I grabbed all the USDT_BTC trades from Friday March 17th 2017 and multiplied the total USDT for each trade by the maker fee, 0.15% (which is on the low side since they charge 0.25% for takers) and here is what I got:

March 17th 2017
$1,773,2666.6642 in trades
$26,598.9999963 in fees
-------
$797,969.99989 estimated monthly

Again, this is on the low side. AND this is only for USDT_BTC. I can imagine this is small compared to the rest of the markets of Poloniex combined in a day.


You're not only naive to think that Bitcoin exchanges "mostly do not make much at all", you're actually really, really misinformed and should shut up before you further make an ass of yourself. You must be 15 years old or something.


You apparently don't understand the term "guess" or the word "slander". You can call it what you want, but I can express my opinion however I damn well please.

How sure are you that these exchanges make that much in fees? Before you talk and make accusations please make a study and research them well. It would so easy for us to make posts like these but the reality is Bitcoin exchanges mostly do not make much at all. Most of them will close or will be taken over by the bigger exchanges.


Another slanderous statement. Where is your proof?

See my thread regarding Poloniex lag and not being able to trade at crucial moments: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/poloniex-lag-an-ethical-and-highly-risky-problem-1830920

I wholeheartedly agree that the ethical burden is on the exchange. They can control how many trades are taking place simply by halting trading or limiting the number of traders either at one time or in general. The thing is, with all the fees these guys are making daily, it really should be no problem for them to hire top notch engineers to solve these problems for good.

My guess is they either don't want to solve the problem or are creating the problem themselves.

This the first thought that came in my head when I read the title of the thread. Chinese exchanges, before the People's Bank of China intervention, maybe, but not Kraken.

OP, losing in trading tends to make us think about "skeletons in the closet". This may be one of them.

Because bitcoin is still at it infancy level price manipulation is still allowed by traders but when exchangers began to manipulate price then it call for coition. If the reports of manipulation continued it will affect the bitcoin integrity negatively.exchangers are the last hope of common man as far as bitcoin is concerned.

Bitcoin price is controlled.

This is fact. I have no evidence.

There are market manipulators who play on people's emotions.

They are extremely good at what they do

They have influence in the industry which makes it worse

Top of the head?

Barry Silbert
Vinnly Lingham
Toni Gallipi
Roger Ver
Chinese exchanges (miners)


These people probably share a whatsapp group or slack where they coordinate attacks ( i kid)

Lol whoever thinks Bitcoin price is a free market is crazy. The price has been controlled since 2013, they literally hand draw the charts.

Its hard to understand how kraken which has spent substantial money recently in acquiring other exchanges and bitcoin businesses could have such a crappy backend.  You compare that with poloniex which has about 17k concurrent users online and hardly exhibits any lag.

I don't have evidence to make claims beyond what I have already.

But you are looking at this back to front. No exchange should be able to keep up the price on their own exchange given the circumstances. But one exchange certainly did artificially hold up it's own price.

This does then lead to worrying implications. it's a simple thought problem, work it out. It only leaves one possibility which is entirely plausible.

Kraken accounts for less than 10% of the total Bitcoin daily volume, please explain how they could have manipulated the global price?

Here is another observation...

None of the buying orders would have existed at the start.

New buying orders still have to go through a queue to navigate in and out of the DB.

By the time the price started to advance upward again, there is no possible way there should be any sell orders lingering in the queue, especially ones that were launched very quickly following the news announcement. To advance the price the volume of buying orders must exceed the volume of sell orders. Which means the buying queue has consumed the selling queue.

I agree, DB access could cause latency that is greater than what you'd expect from the processor. I still think the network is the tightest bottle though.

But obviously we are talking about seconds, even if it is many seconds leading into minutes. 40 minutes is not anywhere near the realm of plausible by orders of magnitude.

Frankly I don't think this all went down as perfectly as planned. They left a trail data that clearly shows market manipulation, specifically the exchanges front running their clients.

remember the 6 hour lags on mtGox?

40 minutes... pffft ;-)

EDIT: maybe not network congestion, but trading enginge congestion (on db level) could be an explanation. If not coded well, the sell side of the order book being constantly flooded with new entries could lead to lock escalations. As to why your small buy order went through without hassle... maybe they have separate db tables for BID/ASK.
I don't know.

Anyhow, such technical problems should not occur in a trading engine of any reputable exchange. If it was built for trading magick the gathering cards I could understand, but surely the kraken engine would have to have been built with considerable load in mind.

40 minute lag is ridiculous, as I said in 2011 regarding gox' engine: I could probably build one with higher capacity running on my phone.

For perspective, look at some altcoin trading engines like poloniex. Swarmed with bots these engines express no considerable lag at all, neither do the web frontends.

Even if the engine has unfixable throughput problems, this could be tackled at the incoming end: new orders should be denied by API/web frontend if they can't be executed in a timely manner. Everything else is borderline criminal.

Legitimate trading was blocked by insiders and the exchange (kraken), the price was fixed, with a follow-up short squeeze.

I have been a member of the Bitcoin community for quite some time, though a rather silent one. I read, I watch. I have also been actively trading. I am quite aware of some of the complaints and accusations that come up during periods of rapid price movement, particularly the ones that are quite simple to see coming. Though largely evidence is not available. I have experienced some sketchy things myself as well, though haven't been able to dismiss the technical hand waiving excuses that are issued.

Given this recent significant day was certain to have all eyes watching and all hands on deck, I was not going to be routed this time.

To substantiate what I am going to say, without identifying myself, let it be known I am highly educated and experienced in the relevant domains. What I am going to say is not an opinion but a qualified professional conclusion based on planned testing and observation.

The standard excuses are that the servers can not handle such peak loads, that that much traffic is no different than a DDOS. This ma ybe true or simply contrived and convenient. It doesn't have to be true but it may very well be. Though I'm sure the point still will be made by someone, in this case it has no relevance. I prepared to circumnavigate the bottleneck on the web front end.

To prepare for the day I wrote a python GUI to interact directly with the trading systems's API. It was simple with buttons for long and short orders at market rate. It also had a button I called 'clear' that fetched my account balanced details (it also toggled the colour of the buttons after use). This clear button enabled me to test the system responsiveness. As turned out it worked perfectly and I did in fact not suffer the same congestion the web front end experiences. Yay me. This GUI was set to be always visible above my other open windows so I couldn't fumble to get to it.

I also had my exchange account page open such that I could keep pressing F5 on my orders page to confirm that my orders were in fact processed and lodged into the system.

To ensure that I would be one of the fastest human actors, only beaten by well written bots or tightly placed Stop orders, I also wrote a script to fetch and parse a handful of pages that would likely post the ETF news and it did so on a 3 second timer. This data was continuously displayed in a terminal which then told me which of the open tabs I need to check before hitting those order buttons. The process was as efficiently streamlined as I could manage with the time I had. It worked perfectly. My Star trek Red Alert siren went off even before the price had moved much at all.

I had acted slightly slower than I was planning as the siren, my phone, and two separate chart pages all triggered their alarms in a cascade, it nearly gave me a heart attack while clicking to the correct browser tab (bats).

The following is a screen shot of what I was looking at during the activity (redacted to obscure identity). Followed by observations of the significant details and my conclusions.


https://i.imgur.com/bkbsOX4.jpg

This screen shot was taken at 4:40 Eastern Time (9:40 in my time zone)

Observation Notes:

1. 4 orders had been accepted by the system at the following times (they were significant in size):

• 4:06
• 4:07
• 4:07
• 4:13

Also, as you can see from kraken/cryotowatch chart tool, two other orders were filled at (pressed the button enough times would certainly saturate my limits ensuring end-to-end success in the event of high failure rate):

• 4:05
• 4:07

2. Observe the current time stamp: 4:40

This is 35 minutes after they were accepted.


3. Observe the data is current as the page reload timer reads 8 seconds.



Many people have commented over the last couple of days about how unprecedented the drop was. The current sock puppet narrative is that Bitcoin has really stabilised as a market and does not crash so much, it is now healthy. Nothing could be further from the truth. I do now sadly find myself in agreement with the SEC.

The current narrative is total bullcrap to cover observable strange characteristics of the market, Bitcoin is as unhealthy as it has even been and more. Bitcoin is now in full crisis mode after manipulation of this scale.

Corrections are healthy. The market must decide the base support price before any speculation can be reasonably made. On this big day, the market was blocked by an inside group that are now showing signs of significant degrees of criminality. This ETF day was ...  a heist. 

The market was not allowed to express it is opinion of the ETF result.

The general consensus was that the price was going to go sub 800. It could have gone much much lower.

Also, many people have commented since that the price didn't drop as sharply as they had expected. That the price didn't go as low as expected. That the price came back faster than they expected.

All of you were watching, I know you were. You thought the same things didn't you.


This is what I assume happened:

Wales in collusion with the exchanges rigged the order books (this just wouldn't work without inside collusion). They had a limit to how much they could invest in such a scam and a limit to their risk appetite. Leaving a high price massive purchase open to the behaviour of a free market could have worked out very badly. So they controlled the price trajectory.

Only a controlled amount of sell orders we are allowed to be executed. Enough to allow for a sudden drop (they f***ed up the rate of decent here). The rest of the orders were just stashed and ignored (no trading market has ever tolerated such behaviour from an exchange, this is capitol sin #1. Even just a small pinch of replaying the order book such that the house games the clients is outrageous).


At a controlled rate the orders were consumed by some massive buying holding the line at 1,000 Euro. This went on for half an hour!!!!!!! No f***in way is that realistic. The volume traded doesn't even support that detail.

What followed then was a short squeeze.


Excuses that are made when such behaviour has been suspect is 'network congestion'. Here in this case I have proved that didn't happen to me at least. The next excuse is the trading  computer system was overwhelmed. That doesn't require counter evidence. Computers simply do not work like that. Processing orders is nothing like multidimensional numerical algorithms that take time to converge (which modern computers can handle). Trade orders is simple accounting, addition and subtraction. Computers rip through that work like they were born to do it (they were). As the provided evidence shows, orders were still not processed a full 40 minutes later! Even being pragmatic and accepting that sure some latency occurred, the processing slowed down some. It would have been in the order of seconds, at most if they really do have crap computers (they do not), a couple of minutes. Not 40 minutes. My single laptop could have crunched those number in less time. Furthermore, in almost all system, the network in the bottleneck. Computers can in most cases process whatever a network can deliver.

There was no system throughput problems anyway, I tested that too with a small buy order that went through instantly. The web front end was laggy, I'm sure that pissed people off (though irrelevant)

Software bug are also no valid excuses. The execution of orders is a very simple and straight forward algorithm. If there were bugs in it, the ALL orders would get effected, not a conveniently perfect number of orders.

No crime goes down perfectly as planned. The story is the the market handled the news of ETF denial well is a cover story. Given orders were outstanding for so long, though in fact they had more orders thrown at them than they anticipating. 40 minutes is an absurd amount of time to keep orders buffered, I would assume that was not the plan as it smells bad.

Then the short squeeze began. Once the insiders had consumed most of what they could handle at a controlled rate, they began constricting the sell orders even move such that they could begin artificially driving the price upwards. Once people who had buy orders placed down low at a reasonable prices saw the price begin turn around, many then would have reset their own buys. This then set the market upward cautiously. Anyone who didn't cancel their shorts would have screwed then as they were still proportionately being executed against the tide (one of mine was).


This comes on the very same day the SEC rejects an ETF on the grounds of a lack of regulation. It is then ironically proven Bitcoin exchanges are overdue for, and in desperate need of regulation and oversight. The degree of criminality is out of control. They are playing every old market game that is known and it is in your face. You are getting played. This was some over-the-top blatant price fixing.


I have been a very strong believer in and advocate for Bitcoin. Today I find myself disenfranchised.

• The market is not behaving healthily.
• It is clear the market is rigged. Sure there have been a lot of people saying whales move the price strategically to their advantage at odd times. In an open free market that is legitimate (rigging exchanges in not).
• The rhetoric on the Core vs BU is at an all time low. Neither Reddits are readable. Those that control the narrative are reaching new lows.[/li
  
  • This rejection by SEC was not a good thing as die hard anarchists are claiming. Bitcoin must be accepted by the mainstream to survive. That's the f***ing plan. It's failing.
  • It is known that half of all the BTC are owned by about 1,000 people. That is not a viable economy. But that was before Friday when there was the massive sell off and the big scoop. I seriously wonder just how many peoples coins the corrupt among them just picked up. If the BTC are owed by a very few then it is just like a jokecoin pre-mine.
  
  In light of the latest string of serious problems, Bitcoin must be allowed to find it's true current value. If the support level is not known, Bitcoin really could go to $12
  
  
  P.S.   If this market looks like it is recovering to you, i warn you, this gang is going to strike again and dump the price while you do not expect it just as they don't allow you to participate when you do expect it. They do like to make it appear that the fundamental technical are working (though not on the day you see coming). The bottom has not yet been found.