Can somebody explain to a crypto-naif what "wash trading" means here?
Lets say you invent a new NFT. You sell the NFT to __yourself__ for $100. Then, you sell the NFT to yourself (again) for $200. Finally, you sell the NFT to yourself for $1000. Then you go to the public and say "Look, my NFT has grown 1000% in the past week, you should get in on it!!"
Then they buy the NFT from you for $500. Then suddenly they can't sell the NFT to anyone, because you were the only one buying ever.
Congrats, you just scammed someone for $500.
What you gave me a profitable and likely illegal example of a wash trade, but not a definition of wash trade.
A wash trade could be selling thing X for $100 and buying thing Y for $100 where X and Y are the same exact underlying thing. Just moving pointless trades back and forth inflates volumes, which makes people thing the market is moving.
See https://www.investopedia.com/terms/w/washtrading.asp for more
No you don't. But you do need to be buying and selling the underlying repeatedly for "some reason".
That "some reason" could be fraud, or it could just be tax-optimization. The important thing is, "wash trading" is the technique of buying-and-selling the same thing at nearly the same time... which has many many applications.
Many of those applications are illegal and fraudulent in a traditional market. So seeing something like 70% of the volume of the real world cryptomarket being wash trading suggests that there's more fraud in the cryptomarket than people generally realize.
Lets say rich person X wants to conduct large-scale wash-trades to artificially increase (or decrease) the price of [insert cryptocoin here].
By conducting it on Exchange-Foobar, Foobar's traffic goes up, while rich person X gets the price change they want. Win-win for both parties.
EDIT: Remember: exchanges win on volume. They want more trades, they don't care if the value goes up or down.
I kind if assumed it was the exchanges themselves faking it. Wash trading without colluding with the exchange is pretty expensive.
Ex: Interactive Brokers (a legitimate online exchange for stocks) hit it big with its monthly-subscription model: $$subscription / month $20 / for severely discounted trades (fractions of a penny per trade). https://www.interactivebrokers.com/en/index.php?f=1590&p=sto...
They'll answer. You explain to them that you want to give them $50,000 / month (or something) for 10-million trades/month or whatever.
If they let you, you do it. If they don't, call up another exchange and give them the same offer.
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Its called business. When the $$$ amounts go up beyond a certain amount, you make it worth their while to treat you specially. They want the volume, you want the trades. Old-school business, just talk with them and things happen.
Selling your own NFT to your self for a profit, that's something else, but its not a wash trade as in that case there is a price change.
If you sell yourself the security, it never left your hand so you didn’t realize a loss.
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/t/taxgainlossharvesting.a...
What robo advisors can do.. is sell say.. asset A that perfectly tracks an asset (say S&P 500)... and then buy asset B that perfectly tracks an asset (say S&P 500).
So you end up with the "same thing" at the end of the day, but got to harvest some losses.
That said, I think there are some iffy legal situations here, and you run the risk of breaking the law here.
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/r/robo-tax-loss-harvestin...
https://www.sofi.com/learn/content/automated-tax-loss-harves...
Your example only works for NFTs because they are non-fungible.
It's a DAO that enables you to mint infinite DAI (some crappy "stablecoin") for a transaction as long as you pay it back in the same transaction.
One of the stated goals of this "feature" is
> Exploits requiring a large amount of capital will be found quicker which makes the DeFi space safer overall.
Ah yes, intentionally making your own product less secure and more open to abuse, so you can make it more secure. Good work. This is taking testing in production to a whole new level.
No, you’re describing the wash sale rule, which has to do with which capital losses are tax deductible. It covers pairs of trades up to 30 days apart.
A wash trade is a trade with yourself. Both participants in the same trade — not two distinct trades.
How does trading back and forth with themselves do anything other than generate fees for the exchange?
You can actually pay nothing on FTX. Only a .025 taker fee + 60% discount for holding FTX coin plus a .01 rebate for being a market maker.
Most of wash trading is probably done by connected individuals though. Whole point of being unregulated. Just be friends with CZ or SBF.
Edit: I was mixing this up with another conversation, the parent comment obviously isn't about NFTs. I'll leave this here though because I think wash trading is even more relevant to them.
> We introduce systematic tests exploiting robust statistical and behavioral patterns in trading to detect fake transactions on 29 cryptocurrency exchanges. Regulated exchanges feature patterns consistently observed in financial markets and nature; abnormal first-significant-digit distributions, size rounding, and transaction tail distributions on unregulated exchanges reveal rampant manipulations unlikely driven by strategy or exchange heterogeneity. We quantify the wash trading on each unregulated exchange, which averaged over 70% of the reported volume. We further document how these fabricated volumes (trillions of dollars annually) improve exchange ranking, temporarily distort prices, and relate to exchange characteristics (e.g., age and userbase), market conditions, and regulation.
"wash trading" appears to be fraudulent trades injected into the exchange in order to boost the volume of trades appearing on the exchange.
A wash trade is anything that results in the equivalent outcome as earlier. It was used to get fraudulent tax refunds so it's not allowed to be used that way. An example is buying AAPL at $150 in January, and it falls to $100 in December. One could sell the stock to claim the deduction on the tax return for the year, but would miss out on potential gains on the stock. So what people would do is sell the stock on Dec 31st and buy it back on January 2nd in the new year. So IRS made a rule that doing such a thing is a wash trade and not eligible for tax deductions on the booked loss for the year.
Crypto and NFT are (relatively) new online havens for many criminals, money launderers, and scammers to hide within in the same ways that AMWAY, Time Share Vacation Sales People, and as the guys selling speakers out of their vans in a parking lot did throughout the past, with a little Bernie Madoff and updated/modified MLM tactics added. Not saying all trading is bad, but millions of people have already been victimized in such a short time, and social media is in on the hustle because they make great profits within the promotional and "pump and dump" food chain.
I decided to invest just $100 in bitcoin (on a reputable exchange) to watch it over time a year ago, and so far it's maybe gone just slightly over double that (with spikes and dips in between)... I could not imagine having risked any more money than that because it's pretty stupid to send cash trough the US mail system even though it's protected by law, and Crypto is largely unregulated, and one tweet from the guy who owns Tesla can bring the system to it's knees within the blink of an eye. You can't cry over imaginary profit you haven't lost, so I'm fine with not developing a new gambling addiction.
It's very telling how hard it is to see a simple detail about profit performance for other coins online (over time), graphs are way too simple, each coin's graph has a different set of rules and context, there are far too many different apps and exchanges, regulation and taxing is uncertain, the methods of creation and management for crypto are really elusive, confusing, and abstract for the purpose of making the process very mysterious. The very creator of bitcoin is still not willing to take proper credit for it FFS... That's all I needed to really know in terms of the system's reliability...
NFTs are basically digital files, often stored in a Google Drive (which cannot be exclusively owned by nature), but they are sold as if it's possible for a file to not be copied, scam cue #2... What I'm really trying to get to as a point is that it's all basically a giant pile of malarkey for normal people who can't afford to lose money right now. I trust the skeptics more than the people who are raving about being millionaires from it on YouTube every day, because you can't tell if diamonds are real by watching a video on the Internet.
One form of such market manipulation is Wash trading--- investors simultaneously selling and buying the same financial assets to create artificial activity in the marketplace, which is known to distort price, volume, and volatility, and reduce investors’ confidence and participation in financial markets (Aggarwal and Wu, 2006; Cumming, Johan, and Li, 2011; Imisiker and Tas, 2018).