the chart looks like just another pump and dump.
That's because it was Pumped & Dumped. I don't know for sure who was behind it, but Mark (and possibly others) was aware that it was happening.
Here is a conversation I had with him in August when he was asking for "developer loans." Knowing what I know now, I'm glad that he didn't take it. Sounds like I never would have seen my BTM again.
Eh, that was August well before the period in September when BTM had it's big run up. The whole thing ended being blown out of proportion and what actually happened was some of the people we feared as 'pumpers' just ended up becoming valuable members of the community.
The "run up" started 3 weeks after that conversation, and increased the price by 1600%. You're telling me these two events are completely unrelated?
Unrelated in the sense that there was unlikely to be any sort of organized pump executed. Related in the sense that this was probably the first bit of interest in Bitmark from the crypto community at large. We would still joke many months after the fact about how some of these supposed pumpers that we feared in August ended up joining our community and staying and contributing in a very positive manner. At the time it was common to see quite a few serious traders who normally just float around to whatever is getting the volume with the sole intent of getting in and out with a profit actually believe in the concept of Marking. Lots of people joined the community and participated.
In September the amount of interest in BTM and Marking was at a level far beyond anything a handful of traders could have manufactured by themselves. There was interest from all sorts of directions including a fair amount of academic interest from multiple people.
So basically what I'm saying is that what we perceived as a pump group in August had very little effect on the eventual whirlwind of interest that happened in September. They may have been some of the first outsiders with wide social connections in the crypto community to take an interest in BTM, but they certainly weren't responsible for all the over exuberant inflow of capital at that time.
I tried to temper peoples expectations, as BTM being a PoW currency natually comes with inflation. And at it's heights would have been minting 14k BTM a day(ignoring the network issues). Which would equate to somewhere around 14k USD at certain points as BTM was floating around USD parity for a little bit. That's a huge amount of demand that would be required to sustain the prices we reached around the peak.
I think the main reasons that BTM shot up as much as it did was that very few people had any desire to sell their BTM as people were expecting Marking to begin to take hold in the near future. So the supply of BTM on the market was small and the demand was high. None of what happened was due to any one individual or group manipulating the market. There were a few whales buying up lots of BTM and most of the ones I know still hold their BTM.