In the past three months, while Bitcoin has not yet seen the expected "crazy bull run" by retail investors, altcoins have experienced a surge of up to 10x. the cryptocurrency market, which has been stuck in a bear market for nearly two years, has long been stagnant. However, low market cap projects such as #TRB , #GAS , and #BLZ seem to have accurately predicted the bullish sentiment towards BTC spot ETFs and closely followed the BRC20 FOMO, launching a wave of price movements.

TRB, with almost 20x growth in just two months, perpetual contract high premiums, dominated the Binance square and was hailed as the "most classic manipulation of 2023."

Similarly, #ARK , which has surged 3x since the end of October, also has many similar features to the early rise of TRB. This is particularly evident in on-chain data analysis, with frequent sightings of whale activity, leading to speculation around future trends.

First stage: whale comes up on Binance, and cross-platform arbitrage activities appear.

According to CMC data, by the end of October 2023, UPBIT's cold and hot wallets held over 50% of the total ARK supply, while Binance held only about 20%. However, the ARK price on Binance had clearly risen since October 29th and had been consistently trading at a premium over UPBIT, leading to a large migration of ARK holdings to Binance. In less than two weeks, UPBIT's share of ARK's wallet balance fell by over 30%, while Binance's share correspondingly rose, making it the largest concentrated ARK holdings on the network.

During this process, Binance saw a surge of buying orders, with data analysis showing that in just three days between October 29th and October 31st, Binance's ARK spot trading volume exceeded 400 million ARK, equivalent to more than 200% of the total supply and the turnover is extremely active. Several whale accounts had net purchases of more than 50 million ARK during this period, which was the driving force behind the price movement. The price gap between UPBIT and Binance also provides an excellent opportunity to arbitrage between the two exchanges.

Associated wallet addresses:

AMMwxQZGYLEGwSQyy3Q6nmViTD36WCnTQ4

ANapGk9mbnMZtVhyiNrKpWL6ZcUZqg1xyT

Frequently made large transfers of funds between the two exchanges, with deposits and withdrawals accounting for over 40% of the trading volume, earning most of the profits from the arbitrage.

Second stage: Large ARK withdrawals on Binance, voting surge.

As whale buying slowed in the first stage, Binance saw a large outflow of ARK. According to ARKSCAN, the withdrawal of over 40 million ARK, worth more than $60 million, was made from just five whale addresses, accounting for 22.5% of the total supply. Currently, these addresses still have continuous ARK inflows, indicating the whales have the tendency to hoard the ARK.

Whale wallets:

AZQydzyd9GauPFY9VetpPqkvB4Ka2kPZ7T

AQ3fq7zp4QZjTQkhmXQsdvNTY5mCLgqKEy

AS9udo7QPuKv3r3HEo46McWeCkAC63XgQT

AMTjcfENnH4fr32sneYUesLRd9GHEXcjNm

AHd3DPCtsFwAoVdn3NGvnZ5ENvkeBAkzVn

ARK's DPOS mechanism has a voting system, and since the bullish trend, the total amount of votes has increased rapidly. The total number of votes has increased from less than 40 million on November 20th to over 61 million on November 25th, adding over 20 million ARK votes in five days and increasing by more than 50%. The overall voting rate reached 36%, resulting in a further reduction of the actual circulation of ARK.

All this evidence suggests that ARK's price surge was initiated by whales on Binance, leading to a large proportion of UPBIT's circulating supply being transferred to Binance.

Subsequently, whale accounts withdrew their ARK coins to cold wallets. The overall voting rate for ARK has also surged recently, reducing the circulating supply. A series of operations has led to a similar trend to TRB's first bull run, such as high buying volumes, large withdrawals to cold wallets, and no pullbacks.

ARK, launched in 2017, was first listed in South Korea as a strong gambling country. Fully circulated, its cross-chain concept resonates with Layer2 and it being launched on Gate and Binance around the same time as other factors making it particularly susceptible to a surge as part of a small market cap project on Binance.

Currently, ARK has plateaued at around 1.6 USDT after surging 3x. Whether it can continue to write the TRB legend remains to be seen.