Understanding Upbit's Impact on Hive

So this has been a long time coming

For years I have looked at Upbit's impact on Hive. The main reason of course is the immense amount of Hive this exchange holds. It is now at 29% of total supply! See this chart by @dalz for comparison:

And the alarming trend is that in just a half a year Upbit's supply increased by 20M Hive. We should look very closely at what's going on here imo. A main reason would be the potential attack opportunity this exchange could have on the network by holding >50% of the supply (of course this could be far less with other potential wallets being part of the attack). Luckily we have somewhat mitigated this risk by having implemented a 30 day voting restriction of newly powered up Hive. But it wouldn't prevent such an attack (especially if Hive wouldn't be powered up all in one go).

~2% arbitrage opportunity for insiders

I have been looking at Hive's price on Upbit as well as Binance (which has the second highest supply) and there is a striking arbitrage opportunity available almost all of the time. The price on Upbit is often 1 cent higher there which corresponds to around a 2%+ difference in price. There are at least 2 reasons for why this arbitrage opportunity exists: Upbit is only available to S. Korans and there is not a direct arbitrage route (it requires conversion from KRW to $ and v.v.). But even so, it seems strange why this wouldn't be taken advantage of most of the time since 2%+ is a big difference.

Here we see Hive being traded on Binance for ~31 cents and around 32 cents on Upbit:

Upbit moves Hive to cold wallet in 2023

This was a big development last year. We can see that @upbitsteem (which is now inactive) moved 93M+ Hive to its cold wallet storage @cold.dunamu in 2023 (imagine if they had made a typo):

Nobody of course can confirm that the keys to that wallet are only secured offline, and it doesn't feel great having one wallet hold that much Hive. Since then the amount has grown to a staggering ~115M Hive...

Transferring these funds has caused a very obvious signal in the charts. It took me this long to make this connection, but the insanely big volume candles for Hive on Upbit ceased in exactly April of 2023 (when these funds were moved) (some of these had over 2B! in weekly volume):

The cold wallet now stores around 115M in Hive and if Upbit as a whole has around 121M, this would suggest that there are only around 6M on the exchange as of this moment. This would explain why the big volume candles stopped exactly at the time of transfer.

But there is a much more significant implication of this for me. It means that Upbit likely itself was responsible for the massive pump and dump schemes we saw until April of last year. Only Upbit would have been able to pull this off and I guess it shouldn't be really surprising since an exchange always tries to extract money from its customers.

Some of these pump and dumps had over 100% price increases and over 50% price decreases as can be seen in the highlights here (notice how the volatility stopped after April 2023):

Conclusion

The mystery who was behind these huge pump and dumps until 2023 has been at least solved for me. It was Upbit all along (which should have been obvious) and they did this since they must have made big profits along the way. The big question here is: why stop with this scheme? What triggered Upbit to move most of its Hive to a cold wallet, thereby lacking the supply needed to execute these P&Ds? My only guess at this moment is that there might have been some new regulation regarding the safety of customer's funds. What I am also wondering is if they really only used their funds in this scheme? It would have been easy to use customer's funds as long as they could buy it back...

Ultimately I actually feel that this could be a good development for Hive's price. While we will lack the crazy pumps (and dumps) in the future, price should become much more stable along the way. With organic growth this would also mean that price should go up on average.

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