2000% profit within an hour: what we know about the brazen KNC coin pump-and-dump scheme

Yesterday two crypto whales succeeded in dumping 30% of KNC, a cryptocurrency in the top 100, in just 1 hour. A bit of FTX liquidity was enough for that; a total of 5.5 million Kyber Network tokens were spent (~3% of the total issue). KNC coin is traded on almost all major exchanges of the world, and it became another victim of the classic pump & dump attack.

What happened?

A very revealing story happened a couple of days ago with the altcoin Kyber Network (KNC), which is one of the top 100 cryptocurrencies by capitalization. On the FTX exchange, two big players (whales) first raised the price, creating the impression of increased demand for the coin, and then collapsed it dramatically, selling out almost all the savings.

 

A classic pump and dump (P&D) scheme was implemented right on the regulated platform, with many small players (who tried to buy the dip) considering themselves to be the injured party.

Those rare lucky ones who immediately realized what was going on and managed to short KNC are reporting about the fantastic profits in their screenshots:

One can only guess how great the profit of the whale who had organized all this was. A very detailed sequence of all events is documented in this thread, where the fan of this altcoin, The Data Nerd, collected a lot of details. For example, he claims that the attack involved two addresses that probably belonged to the same player (whom he conventionally calls Farmer X). The entire dump operation took place within one hour, with a total of about 6 million KNCs successfully sold.

The community continues to watch the whale who carried out this attack. You can see that they have about 6 million KNC coins left in their wallet at this moment:

Also, The Data Nerd notes that Farmer X may be preparing for another coin dump, as he took over 1 million KNC to the Binance exchange:

Just to remind you, a working exploit for the KyberSwap exchange front-end was recently documented, while the impact of that hack is still unclear. One version says that the unexpected appearance of a whale with a huge KNC balance may have something related to the previous KyberSwap hack.