Is Binance engaging in Insider trading? Insights from testing a cryptocurrency trading bot
Is Binance engaging in Insider trading? Insights from testing a cryptocurrency trading bot
For the past two or so months I’ve been building and testing a crypto trading algorithm that looks at the Binance announcement page, in order to quickly buy a new coin listing and make some nice gains on that. The tool went through several changes until reaching its latest form. This python crypto trading bot scrapes the Binance announcement page looking for new coin listing announcement, and if one is found, it will buy it on gate.io If you’re interested in trying out the tool — this guide can get you started on the gate.io crypto bot.
Since the last re-write of this tool, me and several other people who were testing this tool came across something potentially suspicious regarding the Binance announcement page and how Binance handles its timestamps.
I also talked about this in my recent video, so feel to check this out, or keep on reading:
But first, it’s important to understand why the gate.io bot works by scraping the announcement page, as this will offer a better understanding into why it’s possible that Binance might be manipulating their announcement page.
While testing previous iterations of this bot, it turned out that big spike in the price of newly listed coins on Binance actually happens once the announcement is made, and not when the coin is listed — that is just the tip of the iceberg. So naturally, after observing this, it was time to adjust the tool to do just that. The reason it uses gate.io is because this exchange is more relaxed with their listings compared to Binance so there’s a good chance that a coin about to be listed on Binance, is already available for trading on Gate.io.
Have a look at the time this coin spiked, and the announcement timestamp for CHESS/USDT — the most recent announcement that the bot actually caught:
You can clearly see in the image above that the coin started pumping on other exchanges at 03:36 — exactly when the announcement was made. The good news is that the trading algorithm successfully managed to place an order on gate.io after detecting this announcement.
Now here’s the thing though — It’s actually possible that Binance is backdating this announcement timestamp. According to the logs generated by me and everyone else who happened to run this bot at that time, the bot detected this announcement 5 minutes later at 03:41. Naturally, this was too late to make any profit.
Everyone who was running my bot at that time confirmed the same thing — there is a 5 minute delay between Binance’s Announcement timestamp and the time at which the gate.io bot detected this announcement. I’ve inspected my code and there’s nothing to show that it would have been delayed. The bot was checking this page normally every 10 seconds.
Although unlikely, it could have just been an unexplainable issue with the bot, right? Wrong. There are not of results online about this, but sure enough someone came across this exact issue 5 months ago:
The replies on the stackoverflow state that it might be one of two things:
The CDN is caching page content locally, crating the 5 minute delay
Binance is purposefully restricting and delaying this information so that an exclusive group of people can make money on this before everyone else.
If the second option is true, then Binance is engaging in insider trading — and I’m hoping that’s not the case.
Whether it’s the first or the second option, the truth is that, if this issue is consistent, the vast majority of us won’t be able to make money on new coin listings.