I looked into CryptoInsiders past posts. He has made 'pump' comments about Lisk just as others (his alts I guess) have done for ICONOMI. These are the exact same phrases like "the price increase will be of biblical proportions", "massive magnitude", "celestial dimensions" etc. I remember these EXACT same phrases on the ICONOMI thread! So I think this is a group of people or just 1 person with a large number of alternative accounts who works like this: Buys a coin -> Spreads FOMO/high price expectations -> price increases -> sells high -> spreads FUD and drops the price again to buy low.
Exactly this.
It's obvious from the posting style/history that these accounts (and many others) were all operated by the same pump/dump group:
You can see they invented the "Feb. 9 announcement" rumor then pumped that rumor on slack, reddit, and BCT from dozens of accounts.
This group may have been behind the 1M ICN fake buywall on Kraken.
The fake buy wall was removed 5 February. The accounts started fudding on 6 February, then turned up the intensity/frequency of the fudding starting from 8 February.
This leads me to assume it is a well-funded group that has at least 400 BTC to set buy walls with, and probably a similar amount of ICN as well.
This means they can make the Kraken orderbook/chart show whatever they want. They can transfer a large amount to Kraken then dump to their own buy walls to create panic if they have more than 1 Kraken account.
The fud this group is spreading is very ironic considering they may have broken US market manipulation and defamation laws. Although, I have yet to see these laws applied to crypto.