Pumps don't announce themselves — until it's too late. PumpWatch reads the tape across ~300 OKX spot pairs and flags pump, dump, slow-pump and confirmed pump-&-dump the second they form.
A sharp, abnormal ramp: price excess over the market median on a sudden burst of above-baseline volume. The spike that pulls everyone in.
1M / 5M EXCESS RETURN · VOLUME Z-SCOREThe mirror image — a violent sell-off on heavy volume. Often the back half of a pump, where the float gets distributed.
NEGATIVE EXCESS · VOLUME Z-SCOREThe quiet one. A coin laddered up over hours — each minute too small to trip a fast alarm. We watch a 10-hour window for a cumulative excess move on sustained volume.
10H CUMULATIVE EXCESS · LONG-WINDOW VOLUMEThe confirmed pattern. A pump that retraces below its pre-pump price, or is followed by a dump — the playbook completed, flagged the moment it closes.
RETRACE CONFIRMATION · DUMP LINKOne indicator lies. Real detection requires several independent gates to agree at once — the standard for controlling false positives in the manipulation-detection literature.
Every move is measured against the cross-sectional market median, so a market-wide rally cancels out and only coin-specific moves remain.
The excess move is scored against each coin's own volatility (robust MAD-σ), not a flat threshold.
Both a z-score and a multiple versus a seasonal, hour-of-day volume baseline must clear — pumps are loud.
A multi-day, hour-bucketed median/MAD baseline so volume peaks and quiet overnight hours are judged fairly.
If too much of the market moves together, new signals are suppressed — that's macro, not manipulation.
A pump is upgraded to confirmed P&D only if price retraces below its pre-pump level or a dump follows.