The Tie, a crypto market data firm, has developed a new metric designed to analyze the most over- and under-hyped crypto assets on Twitter.
The company calls it the hype-to-activity ratio, and it measures the number of tweets each coin has per $1 million in trading volume. The Tie recorded an average of 1.02 tweets per $1 million in volume across the 450 assets they analyzed.
TokenPay, Electroneum and Dragonchain all ranked as the most over-hyped cryptos on Twitter with each reporting more than 500 times the average tweet-to-volume ratio.
Tether ranked as the least over-hyped asset, a logical outcome given that the stablecoin reportedly plays procedural role in a high number of crytpo trades. EOS, Ethereum Classic, Cosmos and NEO rounded out The Tie’s top five.
The data firm noted the largest cryptocurrencies by market cap tend to have consistent hype-to-activity ratios. XRP, however, was an exception, with a 4.07 ratio – a number that raises to 6.66 when the hashtags #XRPCommunity, #XRPTheStandard and #XRPArmy are included in the analysis.
The Tie notes that many of the most over-hyped cryptos are fueled by bots.
“Just like trading volume manipulation, many of these coins are similarly being manipulated on Twitter by hoards of bot accounts, fake followers, and manipulated engagement.
Take Electroneum for example, when creating this deck 2 of the 3 most recent tweets on ETN came from accounts with strings of arbitrary numbers in their handle, typically a sign of fake accounts.”
The data firm also points out that similar hype manipulation happens on Facebook. It highlights the number of Coinbase followers versus the number following Tron CEO Justin Sun, and the number of BitMEX followers versus the number following Electroneum.