Yesterday, an article appeared that revealed several known Twitter users engaged in a group chat where they planned, but seemingly missed, to execute a scheme to take a major position in an emerging new coin — with the intent to control its price, at least to some extent. The message below pretty much sums up the scheme, and saves you some time if you don’t want to read the whole article.

(Its 35MB+ due to a huge amount of screenshots. Pro tip: ImageOptim):

Don’t you just hate it when you hatch a devious scheme, and the whole internet finds out?

If this sort of activity was below your radar, then you should go ahead and read it. It’s not gonna “shake up the cryptosphere”, as the author teases.

But if you were unaware, you probably need to get some real-world insight into how such schemes work. Even if you were aware — like you should be — that the crypto space is probably more exposed than any market, you should still check it out, because it makes for an interesting read.

What caused the article so much attention was most likely the names of the parties involved, and their influence over a lot of followers on Twitter and in their private Telegram and Discord channels (pro tip: use unique handles in the future).

That part makes the story stand out, and while I found it an interesting read, I do have some concerns about the content published.

My first concern about the publishing is that the coin picked by these people, was XHV — better known as the Haven Protocol. Which happens to be my new favourite coin. 😎 So at least we know these guys have good taste, that was actually proven 110% without a motherfucking doubt in the following two screen grabs:

Thats my article, in case you didn’t know ;)

Ok, so you now know what the gist of their scheme was, and you know that XHV was the most likely target. And if its one thing that never fails, it’s that certain people on the internet have amazingly short attention spans, and they usually react like the towns people of South Park.

Look at ’em, pissed off ‘n rushing to sell their XHV, for no enlightened reason at all.

Now please consider the following before reading further:

1. There is no reason to suspect anyone from Haven to be part of any of this. What convinces me the most about that is how comfortably they’re with discussing the details about how this scheme should play out. A major selling point to get people on board the plan would be to brag about an insider on the team — which they would have done, at least 3 times (imo).

2. $XHV did a substantial dive as this article got shared on Twitter — the people in that chat did not appear to have been able to accumulate many $XHV yet as they were taken by surprise when it started moving. So the majority who lost value as a result of the somewhat unfortunate posting, were basically early adopters like miners and enthusiasts who have learned about the unique features of this coin. The story obviously lead to the very unfortunate panic sells from the unenlightened bunch of the XHV holders. The really smart ones bought more, at great discount.

3. In the group chat, they were considering several other coins as targets for this scheme as well. XHV was a favourite, for good reasons, but the monumental rise it had while they waited generated uncertainty as the price grew higher.

Fun fact#2: They even had their own Leeroy Jenkins-type in the group, who asked if they had made a decision AND suggested a coin just after a spreadsheet had been made for members to pledge BTC for manipulating the XHV value. It kind of makes me wonder if he’s just partially retarded or if he is in that many shady telegram groups, and got confused 😂

To me it sounds logical that if you have objections to the manipulation these folks were about to engage in, because it hurts the market, then perhaps you should also make sure not to disclose information that might affect that same market in a negative and unfair manner. You know, those familiar symptoms of manipulation.

I’m not saying that it happened; but the author could easily have used the publishing of this story — for which I imagine he anticipated much attention — to pull off a little move of his own.

This is nothing but a dip caused by some unnecessary FUD.

Now considering that Haven is a fairly new project, it is imperative for them to garner positive media coverage for their efforts, in order to raise awareness and expand their community. This is essential for all new projects. Now, Haven was impressively resilient to the initial FUD effect of the article, and brushed of most of the lost value in a fairly short manner of time.

But a smaller, younger, unknown or less robust project could face some devastating challenges in the event that a misconceived article caused it to drop 50%, in an instant. And that is something one should take into consideration before publishing any type of post/blog/article/story.