Market manipulation in Crypto Currency exchanges has been a hot topic recently, and justly so.

June 13, 2018, a Finance professor with multiple Publications spotting fraud in various markets released a paper, claiming an organized market manipulation effort may have accounted for up to half of the rise in Bitcoin last year. June 8, 2018, WSJ Claims that the CFTC (US Commodity Futures Trading Commission) has demanded that several cryptocurrency exchanges share data about trading activity, to determine whether market manipulation could be at play.

One of the best use cases for Smart Contracts on blockchains so far has been Decentralized Exchanges.

A “decentralized exchange” (DEX) is a currency exchange which lives and is run as a smart contract on the blockchain with no central authority or party running most of the exchange’s functions. Funds are held in a smart-contract, which only the user can access with a public/private key pair. All exchange functions such as buy/sell/cancel, can only be invoked by the wallet owner and not by a central authority or cluster admin. This enables a truly powerful platform for Investors and traders, but also for money launderers, and market manipulators.

While there are some tremendous ERC20 tokens in use today, which hold a valid use-case for traders using DEXs as a secure Exchange, the ease of creating new ERC20 tokens has flooded the market with SHITCOINS.

“Charlie” can create a new ERC20 Token in under an hour using one of the many online guides out there

There are numerous guides and videos showing how to create a new ERC20 token in under an hour-

One of the 43 (as of publication) variations of a “CHUCK NORRIS” token

It really is that easy…

And thus for every real ERC20 token (BAT, OMG, STORJ, etc), There are hundreds of meaningless tokens created daily.