Recurring-clip wash trading and inflated volume on low-cap Bybit spot markets

Summary

1. Two low-cap Bybit spot markets, WCT/USDT and LMWR/USDT, show automated, non-organic volume over 2026-06-09 to 2026-06-13. On both, a handful of identical clip sizes carry far more of the tape than any single size does in a healthy market.
2. Identical-clip recurrence. On WCT/USDT a single 1432-token clip is 8.7% of all trades and recurs every day of the window; three clips (1432, 1500, 1000) together make up about 16% of the tape.
3. Self-trading signature on LMWR/USDT. Its recurring clips (400, 410, 420) split almost exactly 50/50 between buy and sell, the pattern expected when one operator trades a fixed size against itself.
4. First-digit (Benford) break. WCT trade sizes start with the digit 1 in 59.6% of trades, against the 30.1% expected under Benford’s law; a healthy control (SOL/USDT) stays close to Benford.
5. Cron-style timing. 13.6% of LMWR trades land on a single second of the minute, where a uniform tape would put about 1.7%, consistent with a scheduled bot.
6. Read this as a flag, not a verdict. These are statistical signatures of automated, likely non-organic activity. They mark markets whose reported volume should be treated with caution, not a proof of intent.

Metrics used

First-digit distribution (Benford’s law)

The leading digit of organic trade sizes tends to follow Benford’s law: digit 1 about 30% of the time, falling smoothly to digit 9. Benford evidence has long been used to separate naturally occurring numbers from fabricated ones. A market whose sizes are generated by a bot repeating a few fixed clips breaks this pattern.

WCT/USDT puts 59.6% of its trades on a leading digit of 1, almost double the 30.1% expected under Benford. The Kolmogorov-Smirnov distance from Benford is 0.295 for WCT against 0.071 for the liquid control SOL/USDT. The WCT break is driven entirely by repeated fixed-size clips, shown next.

Volume distribution: identical-clip recurrence

In an organic market no single size dominates the tape: small trades are common, large ones rare, and even the most-traded size is a small slice of the whole. SOL/USDT bears this out, with its most common size at just 4.4% of trades and the rest spread thin. WCT/USDT instead stacks a few fixed clips on top of that tail.

The 1432-token clip alone is 8.7% of all trades and appears on every day of the window. Over this window it is buy-heavy (1,692 buys vs 569 sells), while a paired 1000-token clip is sell-heavy (55 buys vs 784 sells) and a 1500-token clip is buy-heavy (891 vs 118); in the preceding week the same 1432 clip ran close to 50/50, so the clip persists while its direction rotates. This is consistent with one operator cycling a small set of fixed sizes on both sides of the book, inflating reported volume.

Buy/sell balance of recurring clips (self-trading)

When the same operator trades a fixed size against itself, that size shows up split roughly evenly between buy and sell. LMWR/USDT shows this cleanly.

The 400, 410 and 420 clips each split within a few percent of 50/50 buy versus sell. A directional trader would lean one way; a market maker would not repeat the same three sizes for thousands of trades. A balanced, fixed-size, two-sided tape is the textbook footprint of wash trading.

Time-of-trade distribution

Organic order flow arrives at random moments, so trades spread evenly across the 60 seconds of each minute (about 1.7% per second). A scheduled bot fires at the same offset and piles trades onto one second.

LMWR/USDT places 13.6% of its trades on one second of the minute, eight times the uniform rate, while the SOL/USDT control is flat. Combined with the balanced fixed-size clips, this points to a single automated process behind a large, non-organic share of the market’s reported activity.

How this was measured

All figures use free, key-less data: Bybit’s public spot trade dumps (public.bybit.com/spot/<symbol>/), 2026-06-09 to 2026-06-13, one row per executed trade (timestamp, price, size, side). The metrics are the DN market-health family: first-digit (Benford) distribution, volume distribution and clip recurrence, buy/sell balance, and time-of-trade. SOL/USDT is used throughout as a liquid, organic control. The signatures here (identical-clip recurrence, a broken first-digit distribution, abnormally balanced buy/sell, and scheduled timing) are the same family of non-organic-volume markers documented in the wiki’s earlier Huobi (2023) and Senso (2021) posts, applied here to two new low-cap markets.

A robustness note: WCT’s signature is stable week to week. In the preceding week (2026-06-02 to 06) WCT still puts 61% of trades on leading digit 1 and the 1432 clip is still 9% of the tape. LMWR’s one-second clustering also persists, but its exact clip sizes rotate between weeks, so its footprint is that of an episodic bot rather than a fixed one. The analysis is fully reproducible: the screening, metric, and figure scripts are in the companion repository mkzung/bybit-wash-trading-analysis, run against the dated Bybit dumps above (public.bybit.com/spot/<symbol>/<symbol>_YYYY-MM-DD.csv.gz, 2026-06-09 to 2026-06-13).