The market has been on a downward spiral, with many altcoins reaching a point where they can't fall any further, leading many to believe that a bear market has arrived. The market adjustment period is often a stage where risks are concentrated and released, but it also presents an opportunity for investors to enhance their knowledge and build strength. Reviewing this market cycle, the exit strategies of various manipulators have been diverse and intricate, and the carefully designed methods of offloading deserve our in-depth analysis.

Traditional market manipulation theories suggest that the operations of manipulators are nothing more than the four stages of accumulation, pumping, shaking, and offloading. However, the core essence is always the precise control of the emotions and behaviors of market participants. Through stock price fluctuations and the passage of time, manipulators can subtly influence the decision-making of retail investors, ultimately maximizing their own interests.

So, in a complex and ever-changing market environment, how can retail investors effectively identify signals of manipulators offloading? How can they enhance their risk awareness and avoid falling into traps? BlockBeats, combined with community discussions, has summarized typical offloading tactics, including one-sided liquidity pools, false buyback news, spot control and contract harvesting, and high-interest staking, for readers to reference.

One-Sided Liquidity Pools: Making Empty-Handed Profits

The most typical operation of one-sided liquidity pools is the LIBRA token endorsed by the President of Argentina some time ago. The LIBRA project team set up a one-sided liquidity pool for LIBRA-USDC and LIBRA-SOL on the Meteora platform, meaning they only added LIBRA tokens to the pool without adding any counterpart assets like USDC or SOL.

The operation of a one-sided pool is that if only SOL is added, when the price of SOL rises, it is equivalent to continuously selling SOL for USDC. If only USDC is added, then SOL is continuously bought when the price of SOL falls. Applying this logic to LIBRA, since the LIBRA pool only contains LIBRA and no USDC or SOL, any operation to buy LIBRA will directly push up the price because there is no counterpart to sell, creating an early illusion of "only rising, never falling."

Since the project team controlled the majority of the circulating LIBRA tokens in the early stage, they did not need to provide real stablecoins or ETH as counterparties like on platforms such as Uniswap. The project team only needed to place buy orders for their LIBRA tokens at different prices. Since there were almost no circulating sell orders in the market, these buy orders would be continuously filled, further pushing up the price and creating a false prosperity.

When the "false prosperity" attracts a large number of investors to enter the market, pushing the price to a high level, and sufficient funds are injected, the project team will start the next step—removing the pool. They quickly transfer the stablecoins or other assets previously invested by investors to predetermined collection addresses. Due to the特殊性 of one-sided liquidity pools, there are no assets available for exchange in the pool, so investors cannot actually sell LIBRA at this point, and any new buy operation will only further push up the price, which is no longer supported in reality, completing the project team's offloading purpose.

In addition to manipulating prices, the LIBRA project team also utilized the customizable fee feature of the CLMM pool. Through this method, they earned additional fees of over ten to twenty million dollars during the process, which is similar to the high fees charged by TRUMP at the time.

Moreover, Mindao, the founder of DeFi protocol dForce, analyzed that although Uniswap V3 also offers one-sided liquidity functionality, its main purpose is to improve capital efficiency and meet the needs of professional market makers. The key to LIBRA lies in its complex pool setup and high degree of customization, which means that its one-sided liquidity pool was not designed to provide liquidity but to facilitate subsequent price manipulation and liquidity withdrawal.

Buyback Announcements That Don't Break Through Sideways Ranges

In August 2023, not long after the TGE, the GambleFi platform Rollbit officially announced a change in tokenomics, stating that 10% of Casino revenue, 20% of Sportsbook revenue, and 30% of 1000x contract revenue would be used for daily buybacks and burns of RLB. This news stimulated a price increase, but just two months later, the token price kept falling, and community users gradually discovered a little-known "offloading" operation—Rollbit's team was washing tokens through the Rollbit Hot Wallet and then offloading them to the market through algorithmic selling addresses.

Buybacks are typically seen as a means for project teams to stabilize the market and boost token prices. Normally, the funds for buybacks should come from the project team's profits or capital appreciation, but if these funds come from the project team's "hot wallet"—an internal wallet used to store a large number of tokens or funds—then these funds are not external capital inflows into the market but funds pre-held by the project team.

Suppose the project team invests funds from their own hot wallet into the buyback market. In reality, these funds still belong to the project team. When the project team buys tokens from the market with these funds, they may not actually be burned or disappear but return to the project team's hands. This is because the tokens bought back may flow back to the algorithmic selling addresses controlled by the project team through their hot wallet, re-entering the market.

As the token price keeps falling, community members question Rollbit's team for not providing transparency on different chains and markets. The method of "selling 30% of the tokens and buying back 10%" is undoubtedly unable to effectively boost the token price and is just another offloading scam meticulously deployed by the project team.

Spot Control and Contract Short Positions for Crazy Harvesting

"Short it if you don't like it" has become the most winning trading strategy in this round. Although new tokens now often see fees maximized with prices skyrocketing or plummeting, since the "VC coins" were criticized, most secondary trading targets have experienced a few days of decline, followed by a rapid rally, and then entered a long period of阴跌. Little do people know that this is also a way of offloading, with the core being the manipulation of the contract market's lack of liquidity and the psychological tendency of retail investors to chase rises and fall.

The whole process can be summarized in a few stages: Firstly, in the early days of a new token listing, market makers usually choose not to support the price, allowing early airdrop recipients to sell, mainly to clean out short-term speculators and make room for subsequent operations.

Then, market makers start preparing for the rally and offloading. Before this, they will control spot chips as much as possible, reduce the circulation, ensure that sell orders cannot have a substantial impact on the price, and also limit the possibility of short sellers borrowing tokens. With spot chips tightly controlled, market makers can use relatively less funds to pump the price, even triggering a short squeeze. When users choose to buy spot and open long positions in contracts, it accumulates enough buyers for the project team/market makers/institutional large holders to offload in batches and start another round of harvesting.

When the number of short positions in the market decreases and the price is pushed to a certain extent, market makers begin to harvest liquidity in the contract market. They will rapidly pump the price, attract retail investors to chase the rise, and create a false prosperity. This round of pumping usually has a considerable range but generally does not exceed the opening price. Subsequently, the open interest in contracts significantly increases, and the funding rate starts to turn negative, which is the signal for market makers to start building short positions.

Finally, the traders gradually sell in the spot market, although this part of the profit is limited, more importantly, they gain sufficient exit liquidity in the contract market through shorting. A large number of retail investors become longs in the process of chasing the rise, providing the short positions for market makers. As market makers continuously increase their short positions in the contract market and sell in the spot market, the price starts to fall, leading to a large number of long positions being liquidated, thus achieving a double harvest.

Retail Investors Can't Play the Staking Game

Once upon a time, the opening of staking for a token was seen as a positive news release in the project's operational rhythm, intended to encourage users to participate in network maintenance, reduce market circulation by locking up, and enhance token scarcity. However, many project teams have used this mechanism as a cover to offload and realize cash.

Project teams attract investors to lock up a large number of chips with high-interest staking rewards. On the surface, it seems like they aim to stabilize the token price by reducing market circulation, but the actual result is often that most floating chips are trapped in the lock-up and cannot exit in time. In this process, the project team and retail investors who choose to stake are in an environment of unequal information, where the project team can offload at will, and even if the project team or major holders choose to stake, they will receive high staking returns and then continuously sell off.

Moreover, there is a scenario where, when the staking period ends and investors start to sell tokens in a panic, the project team buys back at low prices, and then cashes out when the market sentiment stabilizes and the price rises. At this point, investors rush in as the price rises, but the main players have already completed the offloading, leaving behind those who buy at high prices.

Looking at the above offloading methods