Trader claims $1M profit in unusual market maker activity on Binance
A trader claims to have made nearly $1 million on New Year's Day by capitalizing on “unusual” trading behavior in his market maker account on Binance.
Investor Vida said on X that the unusual trading activity was related to the low-liquidity token BROCCOLI714 on the BNB chain.
Memecoin had a sudden surge in price and was sharply reversed in Asia on Thursday morning, which Vida said was driven by unusually large buying positions in Binance's order book.
Vida's post machine translation says “I thought it must be a hacked account or a mistake in the marketing program, because no whale would be dumb enough to do such a charity.”
Vida relies on automatic alerts to detect rapid price movements and gaps between spot and perpetual markets. As long as the trader raised the spot buying price, he then switched short after the pressure faded and the futures settled.
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Binance denies hacking rumors
Social media chatter raised suspicions that the unusual activity was caused by a hack, a theory that has since been denied by Binance.
In a statement to Cointelegraph, a Binance spokesperson acknowledged online discussions surrounding BROCOLI714's price movement and said the exchange had begun an internal review.
“Based on initial system checks, Binance's risk management and security mechanisms are working as intended,” the spokesperson added.
At this stage, there is no indication of a breach of platform security or hacker activity, and we have not received any reports of account compromises through customer support or key customer channels.
Still, Vida reiterated that the design doesn't look familiar.
“I don't know what's going on, how someone can use tens of millions. [USDT] In place to make charity pumps,” the investor said after Binance denied hacking rumors.
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BNB Chain memecoins arise as Solana's competitor
Binance co-founder Changpeng Zhao's pet dog, broccoli, has become a recurring theme on the BNB Chain, which is set to reemerge as one of the industry's most vibrant networks by 2025.
On January 1, 2025, the network had less than 1 million active addresses per day. As demand for similar tokens on Solana began to slow down, activity picked up over time. By mid-September, BNB Chain's active address count had reached a level comparable to that of Solana, according to data from Nansen.
On New Year's Eve, BNB Chain recorded more than 2.6 million daily active users and ranked second overall in both active addresses and transaction volume of the year.
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