John McAfee Appears to Move Cryptocurrency Markets With a Single Tweet

With someone as famous (or infamous) as McAfee weighing in on these wildly volatile markets, I had to wonder: Just how influential is he, anyway, and what are the real effects of his tweets? In the frothy whirlpool of altcoin valuation, it appears that one man and a tweet may be able to move an entire market.

I collected all of McAfee’s promotional tweets from December 15 until now and compared them against the price histories of the digital currencies he promotes. (He also promotes plenty of ICOs, but I limited myself to coins since price charts make those easy to analyze.) After review, tweets from McAfee were reliably correlated with price spikes that sent cryptocurrencies worth pennies—even fractions of a penny—temporarily shooting upwards in value anywhere from 50 to 350 percent.

For example, on December 15, McAfee tweeted that a coin called SAFEX constituted “the majority of [his] holdings.” Minutes after McAfee tweeted about SAFEX, the price of SAFEX spiked 92 percent, according to the site CoinMarketCap (where I sourced all of my prices, due to the granular level of detail the site provides), from $0.014 USD to a high of $0.027, before settling down for a more gradual rise up to its current price of $0.03.

This pattern has repeated itself nearly every time McAfee has promoted a cryptocurrency on Twitter. On December 21, McAfee promoted a coin called Electroneum and its price immediately spiked 57 percent, from $0.07 to $0.11. On December 22, McAfee promoted BURST, and its price jumped 350 percent, up to $0.09. On December 23, it was Digibyte, up 60 percent just minutes after McAfee’s promotional tweet, from $0.05 to $0.08.

When I reached McAfee over the phone, he said he was acutely aware of the market chaos his tweets can sow, and attributed it to automated trading bots working off of his advice.

“Of course the bots increase the pump and dump potential—if you have 2,000 bots come in and all place buy orders, of course it’s going to spike,” McAfee told me over the phone. “I just can’t help that, and I don’t know what else to do; my only other option is to stop recommending.”

“I admit,” he added, “I’m very sorry for the people who buy in at the top of the spike—yeah, you’re going to be pissed off. But if you’re smart, wait and let the chaos happen and then buy in.”

McAfee said that he has taken measures to mitigate the influence of bots, such as making his recommendations a JPEG image instead of text in a tweet. McAfee has also vowed to reduce the frequency of his promotional tweets for coins, from one per day to one per week.

“Had I continued to do [coin of the day], it would have created utter chaos in the entire market,” he said over the phone. “The markets are too small for such a daily thing.”

Indeed, the fact that anybody can look at the timing of McAfee’s tweets and reliably see a correlating spike in price illustrates that altcoin markets are volatile to an absurd extreme. More than that, they’re prone to manipulation by big players, intentional or not.

Of course, a key element surrounding all of this—and especially relevant to the allegations of pumping and dumping—is John McAfee’s own holdings. So, I picked the low-hanging fruit: Are the majority of his holdings still in SAFEX, the coin he promoted on Twitter on December 15, I asked? If so, he would be sitting on a pile of 100 percent gains. If he sold, he’d be rolling in it.