Decentraland (MANA), Syscoin (SYS) Takeoff as Bitcoin (BTC) Holds $6,600

Syscoin (SYS) and Decentraland (MANA) were two of the best performing coins yesterday as Bitcoin BTC appeared to be headed for another day above $6.5k.

While the two altcoins experienced huge price jumps over the last 24 hours, Bitcoin (BTC) pushed its value above $6,700 at the time of this writing.

After rising to a high of $6,803 on CoinEX, the top crypto has found it difficult to break above $7k and could sink lower as bears look to retake the market. It currently trades just below $6.7k.

Syscoin (SYS) tops the list of the biggest gainers according to data on crypto ranking site CoinMarketCap.

Over the last 24 hours, SYS prices have gained by about 44.58 percent to trade at $0.285570 against the US dollar. Its intraday trading volume has reached $263,856,000 at the time of writing.

Syscoin experienced a major price jump in the early hours of trading on Wednesday. Its value soared from just above $0.255 to hit a high of $0.492 at 02:14 UTC +3.

That represented a crazy jump of about 96 percent within minutes. An hour later its value had dropped to about $0.2558, shedding off 50 percent of the earlier gains.

At the moment, SYS/USD is trading at $0.285 and has flatlined for the last several hours.

Binanace API hack led to price pump

As remarkable as its sudden price growth was, Syscoin’s value couldn’t be a result of the normal market fluctuations.

And true to form, it has been revealed that the soaring prices could have been a result of a manipulation. We were the first to report the incident on Binance. Read the full story of the potential $45 million exploit.

The trading community noted the anomaly when one SYS coin was traded at 96 BTC or about $750,000 at the current BTC prices.

It also emerged that about 1.2 billion extra coins had been created on the Syscoin blockchain, despite it having a total supply of 800 million.

The possibility of a hack alerted the Syscoin team, who reacted to these developments and asked exchanges to halt trading as it looked into whether its blockchain had been compromised.

Later the Syscoin team posted the following on its Twitter account:

“As a precaution, we had requested exchanges halt $SYS deposit/withdrawal today after we observed odd trading behavior coupled with atypical blockchain activity. After investigating the #Syscoin blockchain is safe. We are asking exchanges to reopen. Detailed wiki post tomorrow”

The irregular trading activity that saw SYS prices skyrocket has been attributed to an exploitation of the API keys on the Binance exchange.

Binance noted the anomaly and has since removed all API keys and asked users to create new ones. Its notice to traders read:

“Due to irregular trading on some APIs, Binance will remove all existing API keys as a precautionary security measure. All API users are requested to recreate their API keys”

Syscoin maintains that its blockchain is safe. It is believed then that the event is an artificial price pump that occurred after Binance API keys were compromised. The next few days will reveal what exactly happened.

Decentraland (MANA) soars 100 percent

Decentraland (MANA) soared exponentially to reach a high of $0.1822 after it opened trading at $0.093 against the US dollar.

In just an hour, MANA prices rose by over 100 percent, before rebounding lower to close at $0.15 against the dollar. It’s ranked 4th on the list of top gainers over the last 24 hours.

The token is also trending as one of the top gainers in the market, gaining by 36 percent and 39 percent against both BTC and ETH in the last 24 hours.

At the moment, MANA/USD is trading at about $0.1269, which is +33 percent higher over its value in the last 24 hours.

Its intraday trading volume also rose, rising sharply from just over $5 million to over $50milion on July 3.

It now stands at about $77 million. The crypto is currently ranked 77th with a market cap of $173 million.

Like with Syscoin, there’s a possibility that MANA prices may have been manipulated on Binance.

Even though prices appeared to steady dispelling a pump and dump exploitation, it has since dropped by about 40 percent. Binance and Bittrex also halted trading of the coin.

Unlucky traders who had tried to ride the wave have been left ruing their bad luck, with prices seemingly beginning to drop.

It appears MANA may not sustain the upward momentum and could dump hard.