Be sure to move* these Poloniex coins because they have been delisted:

• BTCD (Bitcoin Dark)
• BTM (Bitmark) (not Bytom)
• EMC2 (Einsteinium)
• GRC (GridCoin)
• NEOS (NeosCoin)
• POT (PotCoin)
• VRC (VeriCoin)
• XBC (Bitcoin Plus)

What happened?

According to a blog post from Team Circle / Poloniex on Tuesday, September 18th, “Poloniex to delist eight assets on September 25th”.  They reference another Help Center article for more information about their delisting process as well.

Do you have these coins?

The first step when you get a notice like this is to find out if you actually own these coins.  The exchange usually sends you an email with your specific holdings of the asset.

However,  even if they don’t, or if the notice gets lost in spam folder, its up to you to make sure you find out if you have any balances and move them, sell them or otherwise handle.

Might want to stop botting them ASAP

If you use this Exchange, you will want to check if you are botting these coins.  If you have no inventory at all, then the suggested course of action is to remove the pairs from your configuration.

If you have inventory, then you have more work to do.  At least consider stopping your Gunbot from buying them.   Here’s why:

When coins get delisted, they drop in value FAST.  When coins drop fast, Gunbot frequently will see that as a buying opportunity, so you may find yourself with inventory of a coin that will be gone soon — Gunbot buys it on the way down, thinking that it will go back up, but of course it doesn’t go back up most of the time.

Therefore, to prevent this, set the BUY_ENABLED: false to avoid such situations.

If you use the GUI, and you have some balance of the coin, go to Setups –> your setup, navigate to the coin(s), then add an override called BUY_ENABLED and make it “false”

That way, you have a chance of selling off your inventory without buying more.

If your strategy has Double Up enabled, then you might want to disable it with a per-coin override as well, otherwise Double Up might kick in — several times, in fact.  However, if you look at the typical behavior of Delisted coins, it is a very frequent occurrence that coins have a LOT of volatility right after the initial dip, so some profits can be had.  More on that in the selling section below.

If you want to move your coins

Second, you may want to decide whether to sell or move your coins.

Move coins to a Gunbot-supported Exchange

If you want to move your coins, as a Gunbotter, you may want to move your coins somewhere that you can still bot your coins.  This means using an exchange that Gunbot supports.  What follows is a handy table listing the current exchanges (up to three) that these coins are still trading and active on.  The ones Gunbot support are highlighted in green and the ones highlighted in red are ones that Gunbot does not support.

Note that BTM (Bitmark) uses ticker BTM on Poloniex, but “MARKS” on Cryptopia.  BTM is coin Bytom on Cryptopia, so don’t try to move your Bitmark to a Bytom address over there.  Secondly, Cryptopia’s MARKS wallet is in maintenance as of 2018-08-30, so it is unknown if the wallet will come out of maintenance or not.

Generally speaking, if you move your coins to another exchange where you can run Gunbot, you can then configure Gunbot for that pair, and set a BOUGHT_PRICE override to match what you bought the coin for on the previous exchange.

Move Coins to a non-Gunbot Supported Exchange

Sometimes coins that get delisted aren’t supported on exchanges that Gunbot supports.  This is a sign that the coin is in the minor leagues.

If you don’t already have an account on the exchange listed for the coin, you may consider creating an account on the exchange if you have a large number of the coin, and it represents a major financial investment.

Note that creating exchange accounts can represent risk.  Always use different passwords for every account you use, and when possible, even use a different email address.  Always use two-factor authentication.

Moving Coins to a Wallet

If a coin or token is being delisted from an Exchange, there’s a strong likelihood that the coin doesn’t have a strong presence outside of living on exchanges.  This means that installing a wallet on your own in a safe manner is usually going to be an uphill battle.

It’s important to convey the following:

1. Do not simply google for a wallet for a specific coin – this is one way to get scammed
2. Do not download any wallet you find and install it on your computer – this is a sure way to get hacked/scammed
3. Only use verified wallets, and when possible, use hardware wallets.  This drastically limits the coins you can store locally, but that in itself should tell you something.
4. If you must use multiple, various, widely varied wallets from all over the place, consider learning how to use virtual machines (VMs), ideally on a spare computer that is not your main machine.  Install Windows or Linux and use a different VM for each wallet.  That keeps each wallet separate, secure and it has less chance of infecting or interfering with your real life computer, finances or crypto.

Above all, look at the value of the delisted coins and determine if it’s worth saving those coins and disrupting the rest of your life/crypto/finances to save them.

Selling off your Delisted Coins

Many times, it may be best just to try and get the best price for your delisted coins.  This may be due to how much time you can devote to the project, the timing of what’s going on in your life, the stress it would cause, or many other factors.

For others, the “loss” the sale would represent on paper may be a welcome event for tax purposes.  Be sure to record the sale and keep diligent records in case the exchange does not have the records available later on.  For this purpose, we highly recommend CoinTracking (we have a 10% discount link if you follow https://gbu.run/cointracking)

Be prepared — if this is your first time through this process, you may be in for a shock.  If you’ve been around crypto for a while or not, you may have bought these coins at their peak, and found that you’d be selling these coins at a tiny fraction of their purchase price.  You can measure this in their BTC price (or whatever BASE you used – ETH, XMR, USDT) or the USD value of BTC at the time of the transaction.  Consult your tax advisor for specifics if that is important to you.

Just know that a lot of people are selling off coins, so some people are buying the coins and transferring them to the other places mentioned above, to sell.  Some coins have no-where to go, so there won’t be many buyers for those.  Some coins you might just want to dump as fast as possible.

Alternatives – Double-Up and Arbitrage

If profits are still important to you relating to these delisted coins, and you still have coins left, and they would represent a sizable loss to you, there still is something you might be able to do, if you are comfortable with the risk.

If you look at any coin that was recently delisted – such as this one here (VRC), you can see obvious points where Gunbot could have stepped in and made immense profits:

You’ll see this happen more and more as word spreads – more news gets out, more people log in and sell off their coins, or a market opens up, or the developers lobby for another use case, or all sorts of reactions to what’s going on.  The volatility is intense.

This is where a savvy person who still has coins to try and liquidate can actually do something.

Specific Double-Up example

Here’s one example:

This was Centra (CTR) right before getting delisted on Binance (April 5th, 2018).  The founders of Centra got arrested for fraud and the coin’s price tanked.  Look at “Price per unit” column — the initial buy in February on this coin started at 11,450 satoshis and in less than a month experienced six (6) double-up’s.

Then it sat for almost another month.  When the news hit about the founders, and the price was already down to 1411 satoshis (down 90%!!!) there was a significant amount invested in this bag.

Here were the factors:

1. A lot was already invested in the coin
2. The amount invested was done when BTC was a high USD price
3. The average price was way too high to reasonably expect it to recover
4. The current price was so low, that not a lot of new investment was needed to drastically reduce the average cost
5. The current BTC price was a low USD price

Some may wonder why factors #2 and #5 matter — here’s why:  If it’s a win, there’s profit.  If it’s a loss, the loss is significant for tax reasons, without a requirement for having to actually invest a ton more now.

With this example, Gunbot had performed the automatic double-ups, so any double-ups needing done had to be made manually.  The purchase of 1505 CTR was a manual purchase, which brought down the average bought price significantly, but the price kept going down.  When the price hit below 750, another manual purchase of 3010 CTR was made, making for a total of more than 6000 coins.

Then the price rebounded, and Gunbot took over.  It rode the price up to 2662 and sold for a 17% profit!

This, of course, is a risky move — and noone should ever expect such high profits.  But I expect most people would even be happy with getting their money back instead of selling at a massive loss.  And that’s the point of this option.

Arbitrage

Arbitrage is the act of buying something in one place and selling it somewhere else at a higher place.  You may notice that some people just sell off their coins at Poloniex because they only have an account at that one exchange – but you, as a more experienced crypto trader, might happen to know that the coin is also for sale at Cryptopia at a 5% or 10% higher price.

This is where you might be able to make a short lived business buying coins at one place and selling them in the other after transferring.

There are a number of caveats, which include fees, transfer time, and the absolute problem of not knowing that the price will still be good by the time you’ve transferred the coins over to the new place.

Summary

When an exchange Delists a coin, knowing your options can help relieve stress.  Keep these things in mind:

1. Check exchange for inventory whether they notify you or not.
2. Set Gunbot to SELL ONLY unless you want more coins
3. Consider Moving Coins to another Gunbot Exchange
4. Consider Moving Coins to another non-Gunbot Exchange
5. Consider Moving Coins to a safe Wallet
6. Maybe Sell Off at a Loss (confirm the loss)
7. Maybe Use Double Up or Arbitrage (risky)

• This is not specific Financial Advice.  GBU is not a Financial Advisor