Why Poloniex Alts May End up in Bloodbath due to delistings this week!

Last month, I wrote a post about research I conducted in determining the pattern of delistings at Poloniex of low-market cap coins. In the previous two years, Poloniex has stuck to their roughly consistent schedule of announcing a large group of coins to be delisted on Twitter, to be followed by the actual delisting roughly 2 weeks later at the beginning of the next month.

As I quoted in my article:

The pattern of announcements beginning in 2016 are:

1. Roughly two weeks before the delisting date, but not exactly 14 days
2. A Sun, Mon, Tues or Wed in the third or fourth full week of the month prior to the delisting

(This is based on my research in the article, and not by any public announcement by Poloniex.)

I say "roughly consistent" because for the first time in half a dozen cycles, Poloniex decided NOT to delist any coins in the 3rd or 4th month following their last delisting. Since the last delisting this year was in May 2017, an announcement could have appeared for an August or September delisting date -- but it did not.

An October delisting, however, is not out of the question, and could very well happen this week.

To recap, this is how previous delistings were structured:

Announcements for the above delistings have occurred on:

May 2, 2017 - Announced on Tue, April 18
Jan 4, 2017 - Sun, Dec 18, 2016
Sept 5, 2016 - Mon, Aug 22
June 3, 2016 - Sun, May 22
Feb 8, 2016 - Sun, Jan 24
July 21, 2015 - Wed, July 13
Mar 29, 2015 - Tue, Mar 15

Days of the week announcement went out:
Sun: 42.8%
Mon: 14.3%
Tues: 28.6%
Wed: 14.3%

Weeks of Announcements:
Third Full Week: 4 (57.1%)
Fourth Full Week: 2 (28.6%)
Second Full week: 1 (14.3%)

This week is the third full week of September, and the chances are greater than half that if an announcement occurs this month over Twitter, it will occur this upcoming week. Additionally, the day of the announcement is greatest on late Sunday afternoons, meaning that the tweet could very well come out tonight! Greater than half occur on a Mon, Tues or Wed, though, so it would appear to be more likely that we would see something at the beginning half of the week.

If an announcement for a beginning of October delisting of coins occurs, this would be the first time that Poloniex waited exactly 5 months to delist coins. Stranger things have happened, as Poloniex once waited 6 months between July 2015 and Jan 2016 to delist coins.

I am curious why they waited this time. Did they delay because of the hard fork in August, or the crash due to Chinese FUD in the last month? Or, perhaps, they didn't delist anything because they haven't added any coins. That is, up until now.

In the last few weeks, Poloniex has added 4 popular coins (ZRX, CVC, OMG, and GAS) after a very long dry spell. It's probably certain that they will add GAS's mother NEO, and ZRX's baby DNT. There are quite a bevy of other well-liked coins that would be good for Poloniex to add, which is likely to mean a delisting of low-volume coins soon.

###My Altcoin Picks

Like last month, I will provide my prediction list of potential delisted alt coins.

DRUMROLL

But first, an explanation of how this works.

Coinmarketcap.com has a wonderful page that lets users check out the market cap and volumes of cryptocurrencies from historical dates. The menu is located in the TOOLS section in HISTORICAL SNAPSHOTS (note that it is highlighted in the screenshot below).

I choose the closest date prior to the Twitter announcement date of the delisting. I track the position of each coin's market cap and not volume, as volume is not the best indicator since the volume of a delisted coin in 2017 will be much greater than volume in 2016 or 2015. But market cap position is an ordinal ranking and doesn't require any sort of weighing. (In other words a coin with a position of 550 in 2017 will have low average volume just as a 550 position coin in 2016 will).

I found that the dividing line of previously delisted coins was 40, and that coins that have a position over 40 are most likely to be delisted. (But this doesn't mean that coins over 40 position ranking will absolutely be delisted.)

Bottom line: Coins in the top 40 of market cap are safe or pretty safe. If Poloniex begins dropping coins positioned in the top 20 or 30, I will shut down my account. (Just a little joke, as many of you may already have shut your accounts!)

Going back to coinmarketcap.com, I have checked all the coins in Poloniex for their current ranking, and listed the ones below over position 100. In my last article, I noted that there has been a large influx of ICO coins that have pushed many coins listed by Poloniex into positions out of the top 40. So I adjusted my list to not include coins in the top 100 positions instead of top 40. I also removed a few coins that have solid projects (such as AMP), or coins that are margined/loaned (such as CLAM), that i cannot imagine Poloniex delisting them.

BCY (Position Rank 202)
BELA (259)
BLK (198)
BTM (284)
BURST (147)
EMC2 (184)
EXP (131)
FLDC (242)
FLO (201)
HUC (335)
NAUT (318)
NEOS (170)
NMC (135)
NOTE (237)
NXC (124)
OMNI (163)
PASC (253)
PINK (211)
POT (146)
RADS (144)
RIC (351)
SJCX (887)
VRC (191)
XBC (230)
XPM (298)
XVC (210)

That comes out to 26 potential delistings. From now until the end of the month, I will be out of these coins, and also not trading them just to be safe. Do you agree with my selections?

It's always a dreadful day when you log into your Poloniex account and have lost 75% value of some of your coins due to mass delistings. For two weeks, these coins will be in my no-trading zone.

@professorx

Image: HannahJoe7