Original author: Frank, PANews

The RUG routine of MEME coin is changing, and a new type of bundled insider trading technique is becoming more and more common.

On July 31, Bubblemaps revealed that there were a large number of internal insider trading in the $NEIRO tokens issued on Ethereum, with about 78% of the tokens being allocated in advance and then transferred to more than 400 wallet addresses. Even after being exposed, the price of the NEIRO token continued to rise under the severe FOMO sentiment, with a market value exceeding $170 million. According to the market value of $170 million on August 1, NEIRO's insider trading share will be as high as $130 million, which is the largest insider trading among MEME coins.

Funds are used to buy 70% of tokens in batches from mixers

NEIRO is the name of the rescue dog recently adopted by the owner of Kabosu, the deceased Shiba Inu internet celebrity who was the prototype of Dogecoin. Once it was made public, this name became the new favorite of MEME. People tried to replicate the miracle of Dogecoin. Multiple tokens with the same name were issued at the same time on public chains such as Ethereum and Solana. As of August 1, NEIRO on Ethereum seems to have become the new "Dog King", with a market value of up to 160 million US dollars. But behind this high market value is a boost full of routines and a crisis of more than 70% of rat warehouses.

After analyzing the suspected insider trading addresses of NEIRO tokens, PANews found that these addresses appear to have no connection, but in fact, tracing the source of funds of these addresses revealed that the initial funds of these addresses all came from a mixer address marked as Cointool, and the funds were transferred in at 22:13 on July 27 (UTC time), and the transferred amounts were basically around 0.05 Ethereum.

Then, at 22:30 on July 27, within less than 1 minute of NEIRO’s issuance, these addresses simultaneously purchased about $100 of NEIRO (the purchase amount of each address is different as the market value changes due to the purchase). Such a large number of small-amount purchases in a short period of time also made NEIRO tokens quickly stand out on the Ethereum new token rankings. Subsequently, some robots that specialize in sniping new coins and market-making arbitrage robots began to enter the market, quickly "covering" these insider trading behaviors.

However, PANews tracked the Cointool currency mixing platform and found that the functions of this platform include batch wallet generation, batch transfer and batch automatic purchase. Developers can easily use these functions to disguise as dozens of purchase addresses and buy at the same time. Taking the address 0x 525 F 78 D 35 De 309 f 0 f 53311 C 5 A 69370597 AC 86 A 26 as an example, it cost about $100 to purchase 9.997 million NEIRO tokens, which are currently worth about $1.5 million, with a return rate of about 14,925 times. The tokens were then divided into two transfers to two addresses. As of August 1, the NEIRO tokens in most addresses have not been sold. On the one hand, it may be to avoid attracting attention (after all, the current holding amount of 0.5% is close to US$750,000). On the other hand, the operators have not yet transferred Ethereum tokens to these split addresses to pay for the transaction Gas.

Many Japanese KOLs assisted

Of course, the advantages of using a mixer to hide insider trading are not limited to this. In the subsequent publicity, the project team also used the address number advantage brought by these insider trading as the main publicity point on social media. The third official Twitter post reads: "Our good girl $NEIRO has exceeded 500 holders, with a trading volume of nearly 4 million US dollars and is currently popular on @DEXToolsApp."

A token with a market value of $160 million is not something that can be achieved simply by relying on a mixer. In addition to insider trading, NEIRO also received support from a large number of KOLs, especially Japanese.

With the help of KOLs with tens to hundreds of thousands of fans, such as @apipiro 22, @mikky_ 8080, @yukimaru_potty, @BrotherMKT, @KookCapitalLLC, and @OfficialTravlad, the price of NEIRO has also risen sharply and has been successfully launched on exchanges such as MEXC, XT, Poloniex, and LBank.

Interestingly, after Bubblemaps exposed the insider trading of NEIRO tokens, several of the KOLs who called the orders mentioned above also appeared in the comment section of Bubblemaps, hitting back at Bubblemaps and saying that the team’s control over the tokens was a bullish signal.

No one cares about insider trading, so pulling up the market is the only way to go?

In fact, after the insider trading incident was exposed, the price of NEIRO tokens was not greatly affected, but rose all the way, from a market value of 70 million to 170 million US dollars. According to the latest statistics from Bubblemaps, insiders still hold about 66% of the tokens, with a value of more than 100 million US dollars.

Image source: Bubblemaps

The team's total initial expenditure was approximately $10,000, and the overall profit was more than 10,000 times.

However, as the address was exposed, the shipment of the insider trading seems to have become a big problem. The operator is currently gradually shipping by dispersing more wallets or transferring to centralized exchanges. It is just unknown how much of NEIRO's market value will be left after these 66% of tokens are sold?

NEIRO's bundled insider trading is nothing new. On July 24, blogger @plonkbot said that almost half of the issuance of Pump.fun on the Solana chain has this kind of bundling behavior. And after observation by PANews, it can be seen that the token trading on Pump.fun has indeed been occupied by a large number of robots. If you open a newly issued token at random, you will find that there are a large number of robots trading. For ordinary retail investors who cannot effectively use robot tools, MEME no longer seems to be a friendly place to make money.