The Bytecoin price spike looks and feels like a pump and dump.

This morning I checked the prices as usual and while scrolling down the list I noticed BCN sitting in 16th place just above ETC. Now, this is something you don't see every day. In terms of price, this coin has always been neck and neck with Dogecoin. This spike pushed it way above its limits and reality as well. I had a look around to try and find some info on this and figured out that BCN was added on Binance just a few hours back. That looked like a solid answer to my questions but there was more.

It's OK to see a coin gain a lot in price when it has been added to a new exchange. People want to invest in something new but, I honestly don't believe Binance has a lot of Bytecoin fans just waiting for the gates to open. Here is a more possible answer that was posted on Reddit by /user/Satekroketje:

Just want to shine some light on what's happening with Bytecoin (BCN), as it is one of the more sophisticated pump and dumps.

So let me first briefly tell you what happened. Earlier today BCN was trading at around 72 satoshi on both HitBTC and Poloniex, quickly increasing 30% when the news of the Binance listing came along. It opened on Binance at around 300 satoshi and over the past few hours the price has risen to 2320 satoshi on Binance, whereas the current price on HitBTC and Poloniex is at 190 satoshi. To put this into perspective, the circulating supply of BCN is 183,878,867,869 (taken from CMC), whereas the current price on Binance is 0.22$. This puts BCN on a market cap of 40 billion $; right on the third position, between Ethereum and Ripple.

I've been following it closely and found that withdrawals from HitBTC and Poloniex were not working nor was the BCN webwallet. When checking their blockchain explorer we find that no new blocks have been mined for the past 2 hours. The trading on BCN started at 06:02 UTC and since that time only 46 blocks have been mined, containing a total of 997 transactions. The number of transactions that went through seems very small for a coin that just went up over 32x in a few hours.

Thus most investors are not actually able to sell their BCN on Binance. The current BCN supply that's on Binance is very low and therefore it's easy to pump up the price, all the way up to 32x it's original price. This still caused a 150%+ surge on exchanges such as HitBTC and Poloniex.

Not saying that the Bytecoin team is involved, but it seems very shady that their coin got listed at a time that (nearly) no one is able to move the token towards Binance. More importantly I think it's curious that Binance still listed a coin that is (nearly) impossible to move around and thus easy to manipulate. We've seen the same kind of pumps happening on coins that couldn't be moved around, for example Bitcoin Diamond.

Of course, these things happen in unregulated markets. However I think that Binance should take a stance on this, as these kind of events hurt the reputation of the crypto markets. Especially the regular joe will get burned trading a coin like this.

I had some BCN as well, needless to say I exchanged it all to get an advantage of this whole situation. I expect the price to go back down in a day or two so my advice would be to do the same as I did, if you can exchange it at all.

This is not a financial advice, I am expressing my own views and opinions. Always do your research before investing.