Bitcoin Dark Mysteriously Surges 277% in Suspected Pump and Dump Scheme

Bitcoin Dark (BTCD), a cryptocurrency that planned to compete with Bitcoin and has been around since 2014, has recently seen its price surge from about $20 to a $100 peak in a matter of hours, before correcting to $68 at press time. This means the cryptocurrency is currently up by over 277% in the last 24-hour period. Historical data shows its trading volume has also surged, form an average of about $100,000-$200,000 a day to nearly $1 million.

Its trading pairs on Poloniex – BTCD/BTC and BTCD/XMR – account for little over 90% of the cryptocurrency’s trading volume. At press time, the pairs are seemingly unavailable on Poloniex as the exchange shows users a message that reads BTCD is “under maintenance or experiencing wallet issues.” It notes deposits and withdrawals are disabled while the exchange works to “find, test, and audit a solution.”

The cryptocurrency uses Bitcoin’s SHA-256, and uses a Proof-of-Work (PoW) and Proof-of-Stake (PoS) “hybrid” hashing algorithm. A total of 22 million coins were set to be produced but the project was notably abandoned at the beginning of this year. The BTCD team moved to the development of Komodo (KMD), a cryptocurrency that’s currently trading at $1.61 after rising 16.6% in the last 24-hour period. Komodo uses a consensus mechanism its team developed called delayed Proof-of-Work (dPoW) and uses Zcash’s zero-knowledge proofs to make transactions anonymous.

What’s behind BTCD’s price spike is currently unclear. Various social media users have pointed out that since the project has been abandoned, a pump and dump scheme may be behind the rise. If so, Poloniex may have stopped its perpetrators from getting away with it by freezing deposits and withdrawals on its platform. The cryptocurrency exchange hasn’t released any information regarding BTCD, and wasn’t immediately available to a request for comment.