If you check out Hive Engine, two out of the top five tokens are tied to a Hive Engine tribe.
That's around $2,500,000 in market cap between the two. Not long ago, LEO was far more than that alone. Needless to say, there is a lot of money circulating in Hive Engine tokens.
The thing is though, market caps are not a reliable metric when it comes to Hive Engine tokens, you can see what I mean here.
I can assure you $LIT isn't a 3.7 billion dollar cap coin. Judging by the 24 hour volume it might not even be a 3.7 cent cap coin. If you look down the list you will find another tribe SPORTS with a market cap that could hold almost four POB & LEO tribes combined, in theory.
Let's do a little experiment, shall we?
Let's look at STEM, my own token for STEMGeeks. It currently has a $38,910 market cap, depressingly small considering I believe it has the best tokenomics out of all the tribes.
Let's dig a little deeper, and look at price and volume. As you can see there is currently very little volume, only about $2 in the last 24 hours. I have found STEM generally has a few dollars to a few thousand in 24hr volume depending on if I make a post about it or it gets some buzz for a brief moment. There just isn't a lot of STEM for sale in general.
Let's move the needle, shall we?
I bought up all the sell orders up to 0.072 and nearly doubled the STEM market cap.
STEM is up 73% today! You know how much it cost me? About $3 or 8.2 Hive.
I can continue to buy up the market and easily exceed $100,000 market cap. It would cost me around 200 Hive or about $76 to double the market cap to around $130,000. For around $1,000 - $1,500 (likely less) I could turn STEM into a $200,000+ market cap by buying up all the orders.
This isn't new, there are tribe owners that have been doing this for years and promoting it as the most successful tribe on Hive.
Don't take the market cap numbers you see on Hive Engine seriously. They are easily manipulated and rarely reflect reality. If a significant portion wanted to sell at once, the price and ultimately the market cap would drop quickly in response.
Tokens like POB and LEO have considerably more volume, you can barely move the needle without spending a decent amount of Hive. This minimizes the ability to manipulate the market without spending real money. In reality though, the volume of these top tribes is still quite low, you could buy the entire 24 hour volume of both LEO & POB for less than $5,000. Less than many Splinterlands players spend on cards.
For about 767 Hive ($276) you can move the price up .024 Hive or about 1.4%.
This post was originally planned to be about a different topic that is much more of an concern of mine, but this turned into a post of it's own and will work on it as my next post. It's going to be an eye opener, so stay tuned!