I dislike pump-and-dumps organized almost regularly via Upbit because they don't reflect well on HIVE, plus the side effects on Hive-Engine token prices are even higher to the downside when HIVE pumps.
The question is, what do we on Hive do when such a scheme is at play? Do we play along for a quick profit, do we do nothing or can we do something to stop them?
The subject has been talked about many times before. Due to the nature of Upbit, which requires KYC with local documents, as far as I heard, its users are restricted by their residence/citizenship in the allowed countries. They also have a branch in Indonesia, which broadens the potential userbase, but it's still not global.
So, not everyone on Hive can have an account on Upbit; westerners can't if that's the KYC procedure. Plus, when we are talking about a daily volume into the tens of millions of USD worth of KRW/HIVE during a pump, it's even harder to make an impact.
Since Upbit gives the majority of volume on centralized exchanges, it can dictate the price of HIVE, even if for a short period of time, enough for a quick pump.
Looks like this pump might be out of steam though. If it goes through this sort of support they formed ad-hoc around $0.56-$0.58, I expect HIVE to be back below $0.50 shortly after. Maybe the pump was badly timed, as it started when the crypto market turned more reddish in the past few days.
Personally, I do get a little bit of good of this kind of a mess, for my HIVE goal. While I wasn't inspired to buy HIVE with HBD when the pump started (or on its way), I did the reverse though, and sold HIVE and mostly SWAP.HIVE for HBD (and SWAP.HBD, respectively) at around $0.65 (so not exactly the top), expecting the pump to deflate. I will buy back HIVE as the dump part does its course. If everything goes as planned, I would probably have doubled my liquid SWAP.HIVE during this time.
By the way, I don't exclude the possibility they still have the force to pull up once more from here. But from what I saw in the past they want to wrap this up within 7 days, to not give a chance to any large power down to trigger and dump on them.
Likely this will turn out good for my HIVE goal, but still, these pump-and-dump schemes are bad for HIVE.