Binance CEO Denies XRP Insider Trading, Litecoin Futures Addition Suggests Otherwise

The latest listing becomes the sixth perpetual contract from Binance, following Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH), Bitcoin Cash (BCH), EOS (EOS) and Ripple (XRP). Like the others, Binance is also opening up 75x leveraging on these contracts. Suggestions of possible insider trading have been denied by Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao, who has labeled it as ‘FUD’ while explaining that the contracts are added to the API ahead of time and visible to all. Still, the movement of LTC’s price compared to XRP’s a few hours preceding the announcement seems to suggest otherwise. https://twitter.com/cz_binance/status/1214756183308791809

Binance Futures: XRP Pump and Dump

On the announcement of the futures on January 6, XRP managed to reverse its bearish momentum and experienced rapid gains. These gains began a few hours before the official announcement was made, which Zhao claims were due to API. More so, just an hour after the XRP announcement, the order books were stacked with $400 million on both sides. The rise was, however, short-lived — as XRP’s price came quickly crashing down again against Bitcoin.

this chart feels like all of blockhead's tweets$XRP pic.twitter.com/SrSARwOkwT

— // Josh McGruff (@JoshMcGruff) January 7, 2020

Zhao still maintains that there was no suspicious price action related to the XRP announcement and explained that such movement should be expected as XRP is a top 10 cryptocurrency that is traded on multiple exchanges with high liquidity. Nevertheless, this is not the first time we have seen suspicious price action with XRP.

Little Action for Litecoin

Since the XRP announcement, two more coins have joined the ranks on the Binance Futures platform: EOS and Litecoin. However, both these coins show very different charts to that of the XRP. Litecoin, the most recently announced coin, has been showing steady growth over the last seven days, with a significantly smaller spike in price preceding the Binance announcement. The same can be said for EOS (orange). The lack of any strange pump on EOS and Litecoin preceding and following the announcements on the Binance futures platform is starkly contrasted with the action seen on the XRP charts. The issue of the XRP’s price rising before the announcement was made official could be explained by a number of other factors — but the fact that the price suddenly dumped soon after does raise more suspicions about price manipulation.  Interestingly, in the Litecoin announcement, Binance stated: “To prevent market manipulation, Binance will implement a pricing limit of ±1% on the mark price within the first 15 minutes after trading starts.”