All these pumps being organized by online communities have new traders frothing at the mouth in search of the next big one. It’s no coincidence I’ve noticed an uptick in posts about joining “Discord pump groups” on Twitter.
I’m the Marketing Project Manager at CoinSmart, a Canadian cryptocurrency exchange. My role revolves around building topical, animated charts that highlight whichever coin is making headlines.
On Tuesday, Feb. 2, I was investigating if any particular event had been responsible for cardano’s (ADA) 20% stock price jump — was it a new tech announcement, or the WallStreetBets conglomerate again?
As I looked through the $ADA ticker on Twitter, it was flooded with identical tweets mentioning a big Discord group who pump coins.
“$ada is getting pumped by a large pump group tonight!”
“Finally, #wallstreetsbets and their partnered Discord will pump $ada. They have been pumping $xrp, $doge, $gme and $amc already! Check their last updates”
I made note to revisit this and explore a scenario where if I were to FOMO-in and buy $ADA, would I catch a green candle up?
Case one: $ADA
The first order of business: scraping tweets about the $ADA pump and coalescing them into intervals to measure volume. Below is that volume layered onto $ADA’s price history.
Though it may be a coincidence, when spam volume picks up a small increase in price then follows. Maybe a few people are buying in from these messages. Or maybe it’s enticing algo-trading bots that use brand mentions as a factor to buy in.
Let’s zoom out a few hours and put this into perspective.
Above is a 48-hour view of $ADA which gives us perfect foresight.
We can see the spam rushes into Twitter when the coin has peaked — one-minute off actually. But we, the trader, do not know it’s the top yet.
Instead, we’re looking at $GME, $AMC, and $DOGE, which have pumped over 100%, and hoping this so called “#wallstreetsbets-partnered Discord” is going to work its magic!
With perfect foresight… It sure doesn’t look like a pump took place later. But they did nail the top. So kind of them to do that for you.
Finding more cases
I want to know more about the consistency of this group and their patterns. So I zoom out again.
Below, I’ve tallied up how many times the Discord group’s URL is found in tweets. These tweets have once again been grouped into two-minute intervals where each colour represents a different message.
Seems this isn’t their first rodeo. And we have more cases to look at to see if their community can actually pump coins.
How about we start before $ADA, when $XRP was their coin of choice.
Case two: $XRP
Here are the tweets in question:
“The cryptocurrencies $xrp and $doge got pumped by the same group that pumped the stocks $amc and $gme. This discord group grew 50,000 members in 24 hours.”
“This large trading group is going to pump $xrp tonight at exactly 9 PM GMT. They also pumped $doge a few days ago. This will be big!”
“$xrp is getting pumped by a large trading group that also pumped $doge. The #dogecoinarmy gather in a discord with 200.000 members”
They are once again mentioning recent coin pumps as a product of their community — capitalizing on hype.
As we did before, I’ll overlay the volume onto the price.
Above reveals — once again — the spam begins after a top in price. Though there was some commotion before the big move this time, it doesn’t appear their effort was before the gains, but after.
Most notably, one of the messages is quite brazen — it mentions a specific pump time: 9 p.m. GMT (4 p.m. EST). All times in my charts are EST so that time is marked on the chart above inside the trough before Feb. 2, 18:00.
The coin does grow a few cents over the hours, not quite parabolic like the gains before the messages began flowing in, but maybe one could credit a 200,000 person strong conglomerate for pulling off an eight-hour pump.
This also reveals if you bought a few hours before the alleged pump, you’d make fairly modest gains. $XRP’s value essentially drops and returns to it’s original state. The gains are quite minimal.
Let’s look at a more recent case.
Case three: $DOGE
My opinion firmed up when they proclaimed they’ve teamed up with Elon Musk to pump $DOGE.
“$doge is getting pumped by the same discord trading group again!”
“#dogearmy and #wallstreetsbets are getting support from the biggest cryptocurrency Discord to pump $doge.”
And the big tweet itself:
“Noo way! #ElonMusk just partnered a Discord with 200.000 members. They are both pumping $doge.”
Spoiler: There’s no authenticity to the Elon Musk collaboration.
We see above $DOGE has reached its top, then the spam floods in. A few hours late this time, maybe they were hoping Elon’s tweet about $DOGE would send the price higher?
At this point, I have no reservations in saying they are opportunistic top-chasers luring people into their community on false pretenses. They capitalize on hype, specifically targeting those who have FOMO in the #dogearmy and #wallstreetbets community.
It’s hard to conclude if their pumps were potent, but $ADA never pumped that night and $XRP did grow, but I’d call it lackluster. And the fake Elon Musk partnership? It sends me overboard that they’ll keep finding coins that spike and harvesting off the hype.
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