Recently, I fell into a big trap—consider it tuition paid. I held onto a certain small token from 0.08 all the way up to now, and I’ve finally figured out how this game is played.

The spot tokens are highly concentrated in a few addresses, with retail investors holding only a tiny portion. As long as someone opens a position, the cost for the whales to maintain the price is much lower than the profits from harvesting, so this game can go on indefinitely. The more bearish you are, the more they’ll pump it to prove you wrong; when there are no buyers left, that’s when the net closes.

What’s even more devious is the long-short game—want to get out of a short position? You have to get the longs to jump in first. The whales will cooperate by building short positions, and once enough longs have piled in, they’ll liquidate them all at once. This is a precision-engineered money-printing machine—who would willingly shut it off?

I used an ant-sized position plus low leverage, so my losses were limited, but this kind of pure information gap and token distribution asymmetry is even more hidden than traditional scams. For contracts with small market caps and poor liquidity, you really have to be extra careful.