One of the most exciting things about the cryptocurrency market, in general, is that unexpected things tend to happen all the time. Just less than 24 hours ago one cryptocurrency token SPEC surged more than 4,700 percent only to lose all these gains almost immediately after that. Let’s look into it.
According to data from Coingecko, the price of the SPEC cryptocurrency went through the roof, surging 4200 percent in less than a couple of hours.
As seen on the charts, on May 20th between 10 AM and 13 PM, the price went from $0.000007 to around $0.00033, which represents an increase of around 4,700 percent. Almost all of these gains, however, were lost in a time frame which is relatively the same.
The majority of the traded volume of SPEC comes from an unpopular cryptocurrency exchange called EtherFlyer. In fact, 95 percent of the traded volume over the past 24 hours is on that exchange.
SPEC is the native cryptocurrency of a project called Spectrum Network. As of the time of this writing, the official website seems offline. Their Telegram community is also virtually non-existent as there are only 31 members currently in the group.
The Spectrum Network had its ICO back in July when SPEC tokens were sold at a price of $0.003. We can see that the prices are well below that. Even after today’s 4700% increase, the price of SPEC is a lot less compared to the price during the ICO.
While it’s anyone’s guess to tell what caused this parabolic surge in SPEC’s price, it does look a lot like a classic pump and dump scheme.
This is a situation where individuals attempt to boost the price of an asset based on misleading, greatly exaggerated, or false statements. The perpetrators of the scheme usually tend to have an established position in the asset and attempt to sell it once the price skyrockets. Under securities regulations, this practice is illegal.
Of course, this is nothing but speculation because there is no hard data supporting anything of the kind.
As said in the beginning, exciting things tend to happen a lot in the cryptocurrency market. Just last week, one unlucky investor appeared to market buy Litecoin on the Paxos trading pair, spending $100,000 worth of PAX per Litecoin on the leading cryptocurrency exchange, Binance.
