Price Increase Engineering, Patrick Shyu Accused Of Pump And Dump Through Uniswap

Patrick Shyu, accused of carrying out a "pum and dump" scheme to manipulate prices. (photo: instagram)

JAKARTA - A former Google technology lead and YouTuber with more than 1.1 million subscribers has been accused of engineering a multi-million dollar "Pump and Dump" scheme.

Patrick Shyu, known by the pseudonym as TechLead on YouTube, launched Million tokens (MM) via Initial Dex Offering (IDO) on leading decentralized exchange Uniswap on July 1.

The project's website describes the Million as a mined cryptocurrency with a fixed supply of one million tokens backed by one USDC per token each. The website emphasizes that while it is only backed by a $1 million stablecoin (Rp144 billion), MM “does not have a maximum value.”

After being priced at $1.00 at launch, MM saw a huge 3,500 percent increase in just three days to reach $36.87 on July 4. Since then, the price has fallen, down 58 percent to around 15.26 US dollars (Rp 220K) at the time of writing.

Okay last tweet since I have folks telling me I don't know how uniswap worksYou can ignore all the liquidity stuff and just compare balancesTechlead start balance:- 1M $USDC- 1M $MMTechlead current balance:- 3M $USDC- about 113k $MMHe has sold MM and gained $2M

— DCF GOD (@dcfgod) July 5, 2021

The immediate crash that followed the high price of Millions has led to accusations that the project was a pump and dump stunt. On Twitter, user "DCF GOD" highlighted the large amount of liquidity that had been withdrawn from Uniswap with the same address that minted MM tokens.

“By removing liquidity and not selling, he is effectively selling without 'selling'. This way he doesn't have to tell the community he's selling while they're all buying, he just has to keep his initial promise to keep 1 million usdc liquidity,” they argued.

Pump & Dump is an iterative cycle of Altcoins that get price spikes followed by major declines. Pump & Dump conditions can occur because traders with large capital buy lots of coins (pump or pump prices), so the price of coins soars.

When the market is filled with panic and everyone is competing to buy coins so they don't miss out (FOMO), these traders sell their coins again (Dump or throw) so the price drops. The disadvantage is the owners of small coins, because they can not sell the coins at the price as high as when they were bought.

Shyu responded to the post, and labeled it "absolute FUD," arguing: "this is literally how liquidity works in Uniswap V3 [...] the liquidity range is created, you really can't do it any other way."

Popular commentator in Cryptocurrency, “ChainlinkGod.eth 2.0”, commented that TechLead completely missed the point of DCF, stating: “You have created a 'get rich quick' scheme so you can dump your followers, you have added liquidity when prices are low and remove it when the price is high and profit from the $USDC difference.”

Shyu published a YouTube video on July 6 discussing the allegations, and denied that he was "withdrawing" the investment by removing liquidity. However, the YouTuber also stressed that MM "should not be considered an investment," and described the project as a "social experiment".