Monaco (MCO) an ERC20 token that aims to create a cryptocurrency payment card has pumped 68% upon its listing on the South Korean exchange, Bithumb.

Volume spiked from what was previously a relatively low volume market and pushed the price up 100% in only an hour to a high of 0.0025 BTC. At the time of writing Monaco is up 60% on the day, at a price of 0.001712 BTC.

Insider Trading Allegations

strangely enough mco pumped 60% prior to announcement — kut (@kutilijus189) April 19, 2018

There were worries that insider trading had occurred as the announcement made from Monaco’s Twitter account occurred at 06:02 AM GMT and the spike started five minutes earlier. However, when asked for a statement Monaco told CryptoGlobe:

“bithumb issued their announcement at 1:57pm KST/12:57HKT. Our tweet followed 5 mins later at 2:02pmHKT/1:02pm HKT.”

They also stated:

“Monaco has measures in place to control access to confidential market sensitive information and members of our personnel with access to it are restricted from trading on non-public information.”

Monaco Pre-Loads Bithumb Wallets

Prior to the announcement, three large transactions of 500,000 MCO each were sent from the company’s wallet to a fresh address. One such transaction was noticed by a member of the Monaco discord group which started the rumours that an exchange listing was imminent, perhaps explaining why the market reacted so quickly to the announcement.

Monaco explained to CryptoGlobe that these transactions were part of their “strategy to increase liquidity and access to the MCO token.”

Taking a look at the 1 day market share of MCO/BTC BitTrex and Binance dominated the market following the announcement at 06:00 AM GMT.

MCO/BTC Exchange Volume Share

Questions Raised

Despite the insider trading questions being mostly answered, traders are still wondering why a single exchange listing has caused such a large pump. Especially since there was no announcement regarding improvements to the Monaco product.

Monaco have not achieved many of the projects and promises they outlined in their whitepaper (the original whitepaper and roadmap documents for Monaco are hard to find). Which has to make any rational investor question why the token pumped 100% on a simple exchange listing.