Recently, affected by the Federal Reserve's interest rate hike, the tightening of the macro environment, and the successive liquidation of institutions, the encryption market has shown a cliff-like decline. The previously savagely growing NFT market has also been hit. The prices of blue-chip projects have dropped for many days. Yesterday, the market that had been sluggish in trading volume for several days had a change. The single-day trading volume of CryptoPunks rose sharply, and even hit a new high in three months.

According to NFTGo data, the 24-hour trading volume of the CryptoPunks series of NFTs yesterday was US$8,338,026.31, an increase of 814.45%, ranking first in the trading volume list. 20 items from this collection were purchased in the last 24 hours.

Just when the market couldn't find a reason for the rise, Yuga Labs announced today that it will hire Noah Davis, a key member of the NFT team at Christie's auction house, as the brand leader of the CryptoPunks project.

This can be regarded as the first move after Yuga Labs acquired CryptoPunks IP, which is indeed good news, but why is there a batch sweep of goods in the market one day in advance?

Twitter user @lurenbian believes through investigation: This is a common case of "rat warehouse" in the NFT market. Some people use internal information to make transactions in advance to make profits.

The following is the investigation details of @lurenbian, organized by Odaily.

@lurenbian first conducted a step-by-step tracing through the data on NFTGO and found:

Noah’s tweet announcing that he will join Yugalabs was published around 18:00 UTC on June 19th, while the CryptoPunks intensive transactions mainly occurred around 12:00~18:00 on June 18th the day before (early morning of the 19th Beijing time):

During this period, CryptoPunks made 53 transactions, and the rat warehouse is most likely concentrated in 53 transactions. We need to find out the suspicious addresses receiving Punks:

After searching for a while, I found that the address 0xa58C0b transferred 56.1 Ethereum from Binance to this address without any activity records at around 3:00 am Beijing time on the 19th, and then immediately bought it at the price of 56 Ethereum from PunkOTC. Submit Punk#8843, this is the mouse barn we are looking for.

However, it is currently impossible to contact the specific person, and it can only be confirmed by the cooperation between Yuga Labs and Binance.

It is not new for someone in the NFT market to profit from mouse warehouse trading through insider information.

As early as March this year, Yuga Labs had already been exposed once. Witt account NFT Ethics posted several purchase records and addresses on social media, pointing out that someone had learned of the news before Yuga Labs, the parent company of BAYC, acquired CryptoPunks and Meebits, and hoarded Meebits NFT in large quantities.

In addition to CryptoPunks, the OpenSea platform, which accounts for 98% of NFT transactions, also had a case of internal employees using their functions to conduct mouse warehouse transactions. At that time, OpenSea employee Chastain was responsible for displaying NFTs on the OpenSea homepage, which were classified as confidential information before they were put on the shelves, and Chastain secretly bought dozens of some NFTs before they were put on the shelves, and sold them at 2–5 times the initial purchase price after they were put on the shelves To make a profit, in order to cover up the fraud, Chastain used an anonymous digital currency wallet and an anonymous account on OpenSea to conduct transactions.

In this fast-growing early market with imperfect infrastructure and yet to be covered by regulation, practitioners are always experiencing the temptation of money. They hope that the platform can continue to improve the mechanism and promote the compliance process. I also hope that everyone will remember: on-chain transactions Behaviors can be traced, and suspicious operations will always reveal their feet.