People don't seem to know how pump n dump works so I'm going to tell you.
Say I've got a billion dollars, and I want to make some more money. I have one of my lackys go in search of a crypto with a market cap of maybe tens of millions that has some buzz and a bunch of cult like faithful loyalists.
I go in and see the sell depth, it's not too deep. So I buy it all up for a few million. This drives the price up a few percent. Then I take two sides of the trade and drive it up some more since I knocked out all sellers. Any new sellers come in, I take them out too.
Then the news gets out from the cult like loyalists. This one is going to the moon. They do my advertising for me. More buyers enter. I call my contact at AP / Yahoo or whatever and ask them to mention my crypto in an article or two that is positive about crypto, and I'll make sure brother John gets that job he was applying for at this other company my hedge fund has a stake in. I also have my lackys posting on Reddit and Twitter as much as possible. Maybe have that Chinese social media promo company company help out I mean they have like 50 people full time tweeting posting to Reddit and FB and so on.
Trend followers and bandwagon jumpers join in. I no longer need to buy to make the price go up, they're doing that for me. I just wait and watch.
When I see enough new buyers, I sell a little at a time, maybe taking out one rung of the buyers but not anything deep. It keeps going up. I'm making bank.
Eventually I've sold out, and leave the ponzi market I created to fend for itself.
The ponzi begins to collapse slowly. In our quarterly the next month, we reveal that we sold out of all our crypto.
Then it really collapses.
This is pump n dump.