Market Manipulation Suspected In ‘BitCoindark’ Surge

BitCoindark was originally created as a competitor to the original Bitcoin in 2014 and the cryptocurrency has maintained a rather low profile since them. However, recently BitCoindark experienced a significant price jump from $20 to a surprising $100. It went down a bit and has stabilized to $80.

This sudden jump has caught the attention of many crypto analysts. This is because the numbers show a 277 percent price jump in a 24-hour period which isn’t normal even for the volatile cryptocurrency industry. The transaction volume has also jumped from the usual $1000 to $2000 to a stunning $1 million. For that to happen in a short time is not natural and suggests market manipulation.

At the moment, BitCoindark is only traded on two exchanges: Poloniex and Trade by Trade. A majority of the recent trades are on Poloniex, with BitCoindark being traded for the original bitcoin and XMR. More than 90 percent of the recent trades are of this type. The suspicious nature of the trades probably got the admins at Poloniex looking into the situation. Currently, Poloniex has stopped trading BitCoindark, saying that they are under maintenance. Another message has the exchange saying that it is testing and auditing before allowing for more BitCoindark deposits and withdrawals.

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BitCoindark and Komodo

BitCoindark itself is an interesting cryptocurrency. It uses the basic Bitcoin SHA-256 but uses a hybrid hashing algorithm that combines Proof-of-Work and Proof-of-Stake. The original plan was to have the coin produce 22 million tokens, but this was abandoned at the beginning of the year.

The original development team has moved on to a new cryptocurrency called Komodo, which is currently trading for $1.61 after a slight price rise. Komodo's main features are its use of zero-knowledge proofs for maximum anonymity and delayed Proof-of-Work. BitCoindark tokens are swappable for Komodo, with the original BitCoindark website going offline recently.

The recent spike in prices for BitCoindark has many experts saying that a pump and dump scheme was in full-swing when Poloniex stopped it in its tracks. Pumping and dumping is a scheme where investors raise the price of a coin then sell it off at a high price value – with those not in the know suddenly holding worthless coins.

With Poloniex freezing all trading of BitCoindark, the scheme has most likely failed. The perpetrators would not have access to the funds and would not be able to trade the token anymore. As of this writing, Poloniex has not released any further statements on the freezing of BitCoindark trading.