Opinion: Whale Market pre-trading prices are often higher than actual TGE prices; beware of artificial FOMO effects
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Opinion: Whale Market pre-trading prices are often higher than actual TGE prices; beware of artificial FOMO effects
It's the vested interest groups that are building momentum for you, or if possible, you might as well make use of it.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsAuthor: wale.moca
Translation: TechFlow
I studied and examined over 12 airdrops and discovered that Whales Market is manipulating you.
Whales Market is a platform where you can trade tokens and airdrop points before token generation events (TGEs).
Essentially, it's a pre-listing OTC market where users can create buy and sell orders.
For example: the token $BLOCK from Blockgames. Many people already have allocations due to airdrops or private round investments.
Theoretically, they own a certain amount of $BLOCK even before TGE. However, they cannot trade on exchanges because the token doesn't officially exist yet.
This is where Whales Market comes in.
On Whales Market, you can sell your tokens OTC. In principle, you sell your rights to the tokens at a set price (regardless of the actual TGE price).
Within 24 hours after TGE: the seller receives the agreed amount, and the buyer receives the tokens.
In the past, many hyped-up tokens were traded here before their official listing. I'm sure you've seen such posts on Twitter, generating massive buzz around these tokens:
However, if you look at past pre-TGE trades that later dropped significantly, you'll quickly realize: prices paid there are sometimes far higher than the "real" market price at TGE.
I analyzed 12 airdropped tokens:
Quite a big price difference, right? But why is this happening? Teams (and affiliated investors) have an interest in inflating pre-listing prices.
A post-listing drop of 10-30% could be attributed to speculation, but drops exceeding 50% are highly suspicious.
For instance, $BLOCK had some questionable trades. One wallet, after receiving funds from Binance, bought two listed orders at prices far above the "floor," despite having zero prior trading activity. Interestingly, the purchasing wallet also had no previous activity. I'm not ZachXBT (a well-known on-chain investigator), so I didn't dig deeper.
As always, catching alpha means staying alert—don't let hype push you into making dumb decisions like buying at inflated valuations or letting FOMO take control. Be especially cautious with tokens showing low pre-market volume, as they're more susceptible to manipulation.
Whales Market isn't the culprit—in fact, they provide a very useful service.
It's the vested interests creating the hype for you—or if possible, you might as well use it, since anyone can list and sell there.
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