Wow, I have like 2500 pages of polo lending earnings and even wrote a few times about how to game the polo lending bot, which they have fixed/changed since.. Never have I heard of any losses from polo lending..
He says "some random shitcoin (CLAM) I haven't even heard of". He must not have been around all that long.. Isn't clam coin dooglus's or something related to that casino?
https://medium.com/circle-trader/overview-of-btc-margin-lending-pool-losses-a2f0905aaa56The losses to the lending pool occurred for several reasons. First, the velocity of the crash and the lack of liquidity in the CLAM market made it impossible for all of the automatic liquidations of CLAM margin positions to process as they normally would in a liquid market. In addition, a significant amount of the total loan value was collateralized in CLAM, so both the borrowers positions and their collateral lost most of their value simultaneously. As a result, some borrowers were unable to repay their loans with the digital assets they held on Poloniex.
Sounds like a great way for a clam whale to scam a bunch of BTC off of polo..
Also I am very familiar with the Clamcoin market, and it was well known to have a lack of liquidity. This was not an accident it was a setup. This is exactly the type of behavior Cryptsy was exhibiting, in fact point by point. If I remember right Cryptsy didn't have margin trading, but they played similar games with liquidity and other processes. For example they would let people drive up a coin's price then disable the front end so they could scalp the order books via the API which was still active.
I've traded clams for a long time too, loaned on polo for a long time, and saw cryptsy pull some stuff but more like disable wallets to let a pump run but have never been much into APIs..
If you were a clam whale you could put some clams on polo and use them to borrow a margin position against, use that and all your BTC to pump clam, then dump all your clam and withdraw all the BTC you could immediately.. If you wrecked polo's bot you might make off with some BTC of lenders funds..
You could do this with 2 accounts..
One to deposit clam and use to borrow BTC against and use the btc to pump clam and place huge buy orders on clam.
2nd account to deposit clam and dump onto the pump and to dump onto your other account which is just clams you used to borrow BTC to dump onto..