Why are bots constantly manipulating the market? Are they malicious or they do it for a good will?

You may noticed that even in such a high volatile market, there is a constant buying/selling going on. Not all of them are made by people. Many are made by bots. They are referred to as rebalancing/market making bots.

Market making bots may take some profit but this is not their ultimate goal. But why are they trading without focusing on their profit?

These bots are trying to reduce volatility of the market. Stopping sudden jump or sudden dip. The reason is that they want to keep the coins as stable as possible and prevent abuse of single players. This prevents liquidation and high profit taking of individuals.

Another role of these bots is to normalize price over different exchanges. Eg. preventing high price differences between binance and coinbase. They sell/buy between different exchanges.

But, why in earth someone should try balance the networks and market? Actually most of these bots belong to companies.

Let me explain by example. Consider ripple company . It is trying to provide service for financial institutions. It uses $XRP as its liquidity back up. If the price of it fluctuates a lot, it is not interesting for those institutions (especially if it goes too much down), they want to have a reliable market. So, ripple, even though isn’t publicly announced, is most likely benefits from market making bots.

There are many companies providing such bots. They may provide promises on how much up or down the market can go. Cryptohupper, Wundertrading, Hummingbot etc are amongst such companies.

Nevertheless when a huge amount of money flows in or out of the market, these bots can’t do much to prevent sudden changes as they have limited liquidity. But you can see their role in particular in current $BTC and $ETH price temporary stabilization.

So if next time, you see your beloved coin doesn’t go up or down significantly, don’t curse the malicious evil manipulators, probably it is done by market making bots and you aren’t their target.