Wash traders now.

Two months ago, on February 17th, started the COSS token Trading Promo. It wasn’t the first trading promo, at that time 12 other trading promos were running or done. There wasn’t any rules at all: any buy or sell order (executed) added volume to your score. During those 12 promos, people found that trading with yourself would make you volume (buying your own sell orders for example).

When more and more people found out it was “that easy” to make volume, they started doing it and after two days top ranking players already reached 2M COSS traded. At that point Coss decided to set a new rule and made the following announcement:

Announcements channel, February 19th

Let’s be honest here, that announcement was very welcome by the community as it would have killed all the fun around the trading promo and would have given whales way too much ease to win the trading promo. It was way too simple and unfair.

At that time everyone started to wonder if wash trading between 2 accounts was tolerated or not. I remember that whenever anyone was asking about wash trading, admins were answering that the volume from wash trading wasn’t counted. But nothing else. No one had the confirmation that it was forbidden and that’s the major problem I see here.

Few days before the trading promo end, on April 13th, Rune posted a message about wash trading (regarding the HGT pair):

General discussions channel, April 13th

Again, that was 4 days before the end of a 60 days trading promo. So what ? They stated before that wash trading on the same account was forbidden, they didn’t say anything about wash trading from multiple accounts and now we have a message from Rune himself stating that wash trading from multiple accounts isn’t wash trading.

Also on April 11th, Razzner answered this to someone asking about trading between multiple accounts:

General discussions channel, April 11th

Every point here misleads the users that tried to compete for the Trading Promo. Some of them understood that wash trading between multiple accounts was tolerated and they started trading with their friends. Other created Discord channels to wash trade with strangers, some even teamed up to create scripts to do it for themselves. You know how are competitions, first you try to compete and once you see you won’t be able to make it the regular way, you adapt your strategy, even more if it seems to be (at least) tolerated.