Posts

Spoofing in Exchange..

avatar of @rehan12
25
@rehan12
·
0 views
·
3 min read

Crypto Arbitrage is probably one of the significant way of earning crypto assets without doing much of a damage to your original holdings. I suppose, many of us have tried this method and somehow faced the situation which I am sharing right now.


Spoofing

Spoofing is a way of manipulating markets by placing fake orders to buy or sell assets, like stocks, commodities, and cryptocurrencies. Typically, traders who attempt to spoof the market use bots or algorithms to automatically place orders to buy or sell. read more



Due to this sort of issues, there happens to be a slight window of making some money. Since I was looking for an arbitrage opportunity and I had to do it manually without the help of bots, I needed some thorough checkups of the two exchanges which I was going to execute my trades. Tbh I got excited and made a mis-calculation.



The task was simple


  • Buy at a low price from Exchange A
  • Sell at a high price to exchange B

The spoofing was happening in exchange A. The exchange which I am talking about is DIGIFINEX. I was too much excited about and due to that it left me at a disadvantage. I was fooled by the buy, sell orders and without doing much of a backup check I took the initial steps. But the usual steps were taken care of by me, such as, how much I can deposit and what is the limit to withdraw and do I even need to go through KYC to withdraw.


I deposited my money and started to go slow. And the buy sell orders are promptly being put up by me but whenever my buy order comes closer the sell order vanishes. It happened once or twice and as usual I took it naturally. But even after one hour or so nothing happened to my order. That made me curious and I was surprised to see what was actually happening. For starters, there was no way/icon to fill my order up at market price. A big DERP to digifinex.


So my next step was typing as fast as possible and closing the buy order using the latest sell order price. But I was not able to do so either. So I tried putting the buy order even higher but even after that I was not able to purchase the desired coin. So there was it an education of life time. To my surprise when I noticed the volume of the buy sell orders, I was shocked. It was only 1/3 of my order lol. I was literally in shock and I was so angry at myself for not checking this small number which would have saved a lot of my time.


Two precise things must have happened over here


  • Spoofing
  • No liquidity was there and the exchange was just misleading the user using the UI.

Either way I am done using digifinex and learned a very good lesson.


Technically before going after an arbitrage opportunity, I even check coingecko for this sort of numbers mixups but seems like Coinmarketcap is much more reliable in this sorts of information. Since this recent issue, I have been trying to avoid using coingecko as much as possible and relying on coinmartcap more because this issue solely happened due to the numbers mistake of coingeckeo.


All along, I was doing the transfers using USDT, so not much of a damage was made to my original holdings. But these small steps could have saved a lot of my time and who knows there could have been a lot of more opportunities which I have lost. But like it is said, we learn everyday and grow along the way.


Image source :1