A new player on the Blur leaderboard has caused controversy by rapidly climbing to the fifth place in just six days. Address 9082D2 (0x90…fba9) has been accused of relying on price manipulation to achieve its position.
NFT expert, @/nfexdragon on Twitter, recently posted that many people are participating in Blur farming without knowing who they are up against. The expert shared some analysis on one particular manipulator, @9082D2, who is ranked fifth on Blur’s farming leaderboard. The account was created just six days ago and is suspected of using illegal tactics to increase its ranking.
According to them, the manipulator usually bids for a collection of over 30-80 items, and there will be a short time period where they start to increase their bid sharply with large amount size. This tactic is known as “spoofing the market,” and it is illegal in financial markets.
Once the manipulator has caused other bidders to increase their bids along with them, they sell all their holdings to the remaining bidders in one go, making a profit and earning Blur points. This leaves the uninformed bidders with bags of NFTs at inflated prices, which they then sell at a loss to get out of the risk.
This often results in a cascade effect in price, where the NFTs are passed from bidder to bidder at a loss until they finally stabilize later on. The manipulator will then come back and start bidding again, usually on the top projects such as clonex, doodles, pudgy penguins, and moonbirds.
The NFT expert suggests not bidding along if you don’t know who has been buying. If you see manipulators like @9082D2 start buying, you should buy along before they pump up the price and sell to them. After rounds of dumping happened, it’s always a good time to start bidding on these collections as likely the price is just oversold.
