Over US$635 million of Ethereum non-fungible token sales in April were wash trades, which made up nearly 60% of all NFT trades on the blockchain for the month, according to new data from CryptoSlam,
The new data also revealed wash trading activities on Solana, Binance, Polygon, Cardano, Flow and Arbitrum, which had been largely unknown until now.
Wash trades refer to an investor acting as both the buyer and seller of a financial instrument to generate misleading trading volume and potentially manipulate prices. The practice is illegal in U.S. securities markets.
The top two wash-traded collections across all blockchains are Ethereum’s Terraforms and Meebits, with US$11.5 billion and US$9 billion in flagged trades, respectively. Standout NFTs from these collections include Terraforms #4206, which has been wash traded for 86,905.12 ETH (US$242.97 million), and Meebit #13824for 29,453.9 ETH (US$99. 4 million).