What is Metastrike and why is it up 101% today?

The little-known cryptocurrency Metastrike saw an abrupt and massive spike in price on Friday, leaving investors scrambling to understand the reasons behind the rally.

Metastrike (MTS) a metaverse alt-coin shot up from $0.0092 to $0.01871 in 24-hour trading, registering a 101% gain in trading volume over a 24 hour period ending Jan. 5.

Over that time, trade volume went from $90,000 to over $1.27 million on several exchanges. Of all this volume, 64.33% came from KuCoin, followed by PancakeSwap with 18.33% and Gate.io with 16.3%. Arkham Intelligence data shows that KuCoin is also the top MTS holder when excluding the vesting contracts and account abstraction service Gnosis Safe.

A closer look at on-chain activity reveals some unexplained behavior. One address, for instance is buying small amounts of MTS (a couple of hundreds of dollars at a time in the biggest ones) only to then sell it on PancakeSwap (CAKE) shortly later — and has done this hundreds of times over as a 50-page long MTS transaction history shows.

Another address operates in a similar manner, but the transactions both buying and selling hundreds of dollars worth of MTS from PancakeSwap with no other exchange involved. As with the other address, there are hundreds of transactions like this.

The exact puporpose of clearly automated behavior — making the bulk of recent MTS on-chain transactions — is not entirely clear. The first address may be engaging in arbitrage between the centralized exchanges and decentralized exchange, the second one may simply be trying to maximize profit and minimize risk by acquiring and selling based on the waves the extreme volatility shown today by Metastrike, behaviour that significantly ballooned the volume of the token.

Metastrike bills itself as a blockchain-based multiplayer shooting game that allows players to own NFT guns and participate in virtual battles. The project claims to let users customize weapons and avatars while earning profits through in-game events.

Metastrike developers have made no announcements over the last few days that would explain the astronomical surge in price and volume.

Santiment’s crypto social media trends data shows that Metastrike is not among the top ten most mentioned cryptocurrencies on social media and its social dominance — while still spiking — only reaching a level of 0.031% as of press time. In the last 24 hours, just 0.031% of all crypto-related social media posts mention Metastrike.