What up crypto fam. I don't like to beat around the bush so here is the long and the short of this article: it feels equal parts great, hilarious, and sad. Yet hopeful?
Introduction
I am no whale by any means. But cryptocurrency is a beautifully robust ocean; the depths are deep, and the shallows are shallow as shit. So poetry.
Liquidity is the name of the game here. I've read many different figures about the market cap of gold but most numbers average between $7-9 trillion. For the calculations in this article we will say it is $8 trillion.
At the time of writing this article the market cap for bitcoin is around $125 billion.
So what does this mean?
It would take approximately 10 billion dollars for the price of gold to move 1%. 10 billion dollars looks like this:
$10,000,000,000.
For bitcoin it would take $1.25 billion dollars for the price to change by 1%. 1.25 billion dollars looks like this:
$1,250,000,000.
Oh how much difference one single zero can make.
Considering that BTC is currently the highest market cap of all cryptocurrencies, let's examine how the second largest market cap coin measures up.
Ethereum is about $16 billion USD. How much money would it take for the price of Ethereum to move by 1%?
$160,000,000.
Putting these three market cap figures beside each other is like comparing how long it took me to write this article (gold) vs. how long it took you to read it (btc) or just skim over it (eth). I included these pictures for the skimmers out there :)
It Feels Great
Now onto the good stuff, shall we?
How it feels to be a whale. Well, it feels great. But I couldn't just end the article there now could I? We need to know why it feels great!
Well I guess this is where it gets a little subjective; because being a crypto whale feels great for two main reasons: bragging rights, and market manipulation prowess.
From my brief personal experience as a crypto whale, this article right here is about as far and wide as my bragging rights reach. So yeah. What's up. I'm the shit. Now if only I could somehow get all of my old school teachers to read this article.
As for the market manipulation prowess, well this is where the hard hand of reality drew the line and flicked my nose when I approached it.
My Experience
I guess this is where I should explain the situation that made me think I was a crypto whale in the first place, eh? Well buckle your fucking seatbelts.
Unibright and HitBTC baby. What a combination. Unfortunately I didn't scroll down and take another screenshot so this one will have to do. And I always have some kind of screen-dimmer on my laptop so forgive the quality here as I had to edit this to look brighter.
For those of you who can't pick out what is going on here allow me to explain. Crypto n00bs are welcomed here at Publish0x.
As the chart would suggest, I moved the price of UBT from 14,500 satoshis to 29,461 in one half-hour candle. And in all honesty I did this in less than like 5 minutes - the chart just didn't look as good from a screenshot point of view (you're welcome).
I moved the price of UBT a total of over 100% in less than 5 minutes. Fucking whale status baby.
You're probably asking yourself how much money was involved. Less than $30. Oh yeah. I eat pieces of shit like the Winklevoss twins for breakfast.
It Feels Hilarious
Moving the price of an asset by 100% might sound hardcore if you didn't realize the kind of tide pool I was playing in.
Unfortunately, due to the fact that I didn't take a screenshot of the lower portion of the HitBTC trading page, we can't know the exact amount of trading volume going on that day but it was basically nothing.
In the early afternoon I placed a buy order around 14,000 sats and came back several hours later and nothing had moved. Hour later; the same thing. Now I'm generally a patient man, I used to frequently meditate in sensory deprivation tanks for hours on end, but this day I was not having any of it.
Looking at the sell side of the order-book I realized that the amount of UBT I wanted to buy (~200) would take fucking forever considering some people were literally selling 1-5 and the price was soooo much higher than all of the current buy orders.
So I literally went through every sell order in the book one by one at market-price until all of my BTC was spent. I bought up about 25 different orders.
It Feels Sad
Why does it feel sad? Because I used $30 to move the price of a crypto asset by more than 100% in 5 minutes that's why!
That shit is unbearably sad and a very poor reflection on the crypto space. Now with that being said let's eat some caveats here.
Unibright is not only a relatively small coin in terms of market cap ($15 million) but HitBTC is also a fairly small exchange. Today for example, Unibright has a total 24-hour trading volume on HitBTC of $140. Fuck must have been another whale!
It was ONLY because of these two factors that my measly $30 worth of BTC was able to have such an impact on the UBT price. The price didn't even register on the chart on coinmarketcap. I was just changing the price of UBT on that particular exchange during that particular time - simply because people were selling and nobody was buying but me.
So the only reason I feel slightly sad because of this other-wise suuuuper gangster move is because UBT is such a great project, and it pains me to see that their 24-hour volume on one exchange can be $140 (HitBTC) right now yet close to $100,000 right now on Uniswap and Kyber combined.
Yet Hopeful?
Yes, my dear reader, there is hope after all. Is the hope strictly there for other idiots like myself to go into tiny exchanges so that we can brag to our friends about being a crypto whale?
Well you bet your ass Timmy.
But for real don't do that. The hope exists in the 3 different exchanges that I compared above. HitBTC vs Uniswap and Kyber Network.
If you couldn't put those pieces together here it is: HitBTC is a centralized exchange while both Uniswap and Kyber are decentralized.
Right there is where the little glimmer of hope shines in. After everything is said and done, Unibright is an ERC-20 token that should be traded on these kinds of decentralized exchanges/swaps because the fucking sky is blue.
The flat fee to withdraw UBT from HitBTC right now is 93.7 UBT. That is fucking insanity. To put that in perspective: it would cost $11 worth of UBT to transfer to my MetaMask wallet, where I could transfer it to a friend of mine for less than 2 cents. Now this looks like a job for me. Mad bonus points if someone can name that reference.
Conclusion
When it all comes down to it - the phrase "Crypto Whale" is now at the top of my resume and will be included on my next batch of business cards. Patrick Bateman would start sweating.
But for real though. It's pretty funny that I could change the price of a token so quickly and easily on such a low-volume exchange. It is a little sad that the hard-working people behind HitBTC are slowly starting to lose volume and therefore their livelihoods. Yet it is hopeful because of all the other (better) decentralized options available on the market right now.
And by the way, it would take approximately $350 to move the price of UBT by 1% on Uniswap as of right now. If I was a measly humpback whale, then those motherfuckers are Snookie.
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Check out my latest crypto related article:
Jiltokens - Not a Standard Review
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