What is crypto wash trading?
Crypto wash trading is when one entity executes both sides of a trade, both buying and selling a cryptocurrency or NFT. When done repeatedly, this can mislead investors into believing that the trading volume or market price of that token is higher than it organically would be.
Bad actors will often go to great lengths to hide the fact that they are wash trading. To see through these obfuscation techniques, Solidus Trade Surveillance monitors for several types of wash trading, including A-A, A-B-A, circular, multi-trade, cross-market, and money- & volume-pass wash trades.
Why are cryptocurrencies and NFTs wash traded?
The intentions behind crypto and NFT wash trades vary, but many of them are malicious. In some cases, scammers will wash trade rug pull tokens to attract retail investors who, once they’ve bought the token, will be unable to resell them due to fraudulent scripts within the token’s smart contract code. In others, non-fungible token holders will wash trade their NFTs to drum up interest among speculators or artificially raise the “floor price” of an NFT collection.
An illustrative example of NFT wash trading made headlines in October 2021 when the NFT CryptoPunk #9998 was bought for $532 million — by the same person who sold it.
Crypto wash trading in practice: Hydrogen
In September 2022, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) charged the CEOs of Hydrogen Technology Corporation and Moonwalkers Trading Limited for “perpetrating a scheme to manipulate the trading volume and price” of the HYDRO token, an unregistered crypto security.
NFT wash trading in practice: LooksRare
Within a month of LooksRare’s January 2022 launch, the NFT marketplace’s trading volume was more than triple that of its top competitor, OpenSea. But over the same period, seventeen times fewer traders used LooksRare than OpenSea, and on January 28th it was estimated that more than $8.3 billion had been wash traded on the marketplace as users attempted to game the platform’s trading rewards model. This accounted for as much as 80% of LooksRare’s trading volume up to that point.
Are crypto and NFT wash trades illegal?
In the United States
Wash trading is prohibited in the United States under the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 and the Commodity Exchange Act. Whether certain cryptocurrencies are securities or commodities is an open question, but this uncertainty has not been a barrier to the CFTC or the SEC, who have both brought wash trading cases against crypto players using current law. In March 2021, the CFTC ordered Coinbase Inc. to pay $6.5 million for false reporting and wash trading.
While there is no specific prohibition of NFT wash trading in law, those who do it could face enforcement action as well. Reuters recently reported that the DOJ is looking for opportunities to bring prosecutions in the NFT space, and their recent NFT insider trading indictment – brought alongside the SEC against a former OpenSea employee – shows that the DOJ sees addressing crypto market manipulation as a priority.
In Thailand
Sections 46 and 48 of the Thai SEC’s Emergency Decree on Digital Asset Businesses set out a number of rules banning unfair digital asset trading practices. These rules explicitly forbid “purchasing or selling digital assets in such a manner that misleads other persons” regarding the purchase price or trading volume of any digital asset.
In September 2022, the Thai SEC issued civil sanctions against LLC Fair Expo and one individual for creating fake volume on the Satang exchange. These two offenders were ordered to pay 12.1 million baht ($318,000).
In South Korea
In January 2019, two executives from South Korean crypto exchange Komid were sentenced to jail time for faking trading volume and deceiving investors. CEO Hyunsuk Choi, the court found, made a number of fake accounts on the exchange in January 2018 and, using a trading bot, made millions of false transactions.
In Canada
In July 2020, Coinsquare agreed to settle with the Ontario Securities Commission (OSC) for market manipulation after it reported inflated trading volumes (wash trading). Between July 17, 2018 and December 4, 2019, Coinsquare reported approximately 840,000 wash trades that represented over 90% of the reported trading volume on its platform.
What exchanges can do to prevent crypto and NFT wash trading
Exchanges offering cryptocurrencies and NFTs can take concrete steps to prevent wash trading. Solidus HALO’s Trade Surveillance module identifies various types of crypto and NFT wash trading automatically, assigns a risk score to each trade and aggregates these alerts into unified cases. Compliance teams can then examine these cases to determine next steps.
