Raydium wash trading report flags $1.4 billion in bot volume

A Raydium wash trading report says one wallet booked about $1.4 billion in suspected fake volume in a month, as Raydium’s token ($RAY) slid 7.2% by 1:41 p.m. ET Thursday.

The quick take

Price: Raydium ($RAY) at $1.85, -7.2% ↓ in 24 hours (CoinGecko, 1:41 p.m. ET).
Trigger: Bitquery says one wallet made 22.7% of the volume in Raydium’s concentrated liquidity pools from Sept. 21 to Oct. 20.
Watch: Any response from Raydium or DEX Screener to pools that list huge liquidity with almost no cash inside.

What happened

Blockchain analytics firm Bitquery flagged the automated wallet in a report on Oct. 21, and CryptoSlate covered the findings on Oct. 22.

By Bitquery’s count, that wallet made 22.7% of the $6.17 billion traded in Raydium’s concentrated liquidity (CLMM) pools from Sept. 21 to Oct. 20. It ran on about $12,000 of working capital, spread over 108,871 swaps in 438 pools.

The method was simple: buy tokens, then sell them back into the same pool seconds later. In one Oct. 20 trade cited in the report, about $22,200 of recorded volume cost roughly $1.13 before network fees.

Pools that look full

Many of the pools held copycat tokens using the tickers of known coins, such as Lisk ($LSK). Bitquery said ten linked pools showed about $5.93 billion in liquidity on DEX Screener while holding $10,238 in USDC.

We checked one of them. At 1:46 p.m. ET, DEX Screener listed a Raydium LSK/USDC pool with $579.3 million in liquidity. Its USDC side held just 24.66 USDC, and it logged 11 buys and 11 sells in 24 hours.

Bitquery did not name the operator or find investor losses. CryptoSlate noted the findings do not show that Raydium itself took part.

Why it moved

$RAY traded at $1.85 at 1:41 p.m. ET, down 7.2% in 24 hours and at its daily low, per CoinGecko. Its 24-hour high was $2.02. No source ties the drop to the report: large coins fell too, with Bitcoin ($BTC) down 4.0% and Ether ($ETH) down 5.4%, per LiveCoinWatch.

Who’s buying and selling

In $RAY’s largest pool, paired with Solana ($SOL) on Raydium, DEX Screener counted 15,588 buys and 10,310 sells over 24 hours. Raydium’s AMM held $1.18 billion in deposits, per DefiLlama.

What to watch next

Watch for a reply from Raydium, or from DEX Screener, whose search results surfaced many of the cluster’s pools. A pool’s listed liquidity can look deep while its cash side stays nearly empty.

Bottom line: A bot with a small budget can make Raydium pools look deep and busy, so the cash inside a pool says more than its headline numbers.