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Tuesday, 5 April 2022

“Wash trading” is the latest trend to take hold in NFTs + Covid-19 was a boon for CEO pay

People are buying their own NFTs to earn more rewards, not drive up NFT prices: The gray areas in crypto continue to rattle regulators, with “wash trading” becoming the latest trend on LooksRare, the hottest new NFT marketplace, Bloomberg reports. Wash trading is when traders simultaneously sell and buy the same asset to create misleading activity in the marketplace. Some USD 18 bn of the trading volume — about 95% of the total activity — on LooksRare is actually people selling themselves their own NFTs, according to data compiled by NFT tracker CryptoSlam. But rather than doing it to inflate the value of their digital assets, the sales are done to earn new tokens on the marketplace, the business wire says.

The sales have helped mask a drop in NFT demand: LooksRare’s high trading volumes have effectively hid the cooling of demand in the NFT market. Total sales on OpenSea, the first and largest NFT marketplace, have been declining every month since January, according to data from Dune Analytics. Trading volume has decreased 67% in the last 30 days and the number of traders is down 23%, according to data from DappRadar.

The successful rollout of covid-19 vaccines was good news for the general public — but even more for the pockets of CEOs’ pockets: The top execs at Pfizer, BioNTech, and Moderna earned north of USD 100 mn between them during the pandemic, with their combined remuneration rising to USD 107.2 mn in 2020-2021, up from USD 103.7 mn in the preceding two years, the Financial Times reports, citing data group Airfinity. The salary bumps came as the three companies rolled out successful covid-19 mRNA vaccines and other treatments, which also bode well for the companies’ stock prices: Pfizer is up 60% over the past two years, while the value of BioNTech and Moderna’s shares boomed 3x and 5x, respectively.

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