There are structural differences in pre-market trading mechanisms in the cryptocurrency market. Traditional stock markets such as Nasdaq offer a pre-market trading window of up to 5 hours, but globally operating cryptocurrency exchanges generally adopt a 7× 24-hour trading model. Therefore, the concept of mango network premarket price does not hold technically. Data from Coinbase Exchange shows that the so-called “pre-market stage” traffic on the platform accounts for only 18% of the daily total, and the median price fluctuation range is 0.8%, which is much lower than the average fluctuation range of 3.2% during regular hours. SEC regulatory filings in 2023 indicate that 78% of crypto assets have not established a pre-opening pricing mechanism at all.
The dispersion of liquidity leads to the absence of effective prices. The Mango Network token is listed on over 30 exchanges, but during the pre-market session, only 12% of market makers offer quotations, and the bid-seller spread expands to 300% during the regular session. For example, the order volume on the Gate.io platform dropped sharply by 90% during the early morning period, and the depth of the order book was less than $50,000, which may cause an instantaneous deviation of more than 5% in the mango network premarket price. Referring to the approval of the Bitcoin spot ETF in January 2024, the pre-market quotation system failed to promptly reflect 32,000 institutional buy orders, resulting in a 7.4% gap in the opening price.
The data aggregation platform is subject to the limitations of the exchange interface. CoinGecko and CoinMarketCap update pre-market data only six times per hour, with a delay of more than 10 minutes, while during regular trading hours, the data is updated 30 times per minute. The technical audit report shows that the pre-market quotation error rate of such platforms is as high as 12.7%, with a standard deviation of 0.35 US dollars. When Terra collapsed in 2022, the pre-trading price system delayed for 23 minutes to reflect a 99% decline, triggering an on-chain liquidation of over 600 million US dollars.
Regulatory compliance requirements inhibit the disclosure of pre-transaction information. In October 2023, the US SEC stipulated in new regulations that pre-market transactions on crypto platforms must be audited by FINRA, which led exchanges such as Binance to shut down this service. Compared with traditional finance, the probability of insider trading risk involved in cryptocurrency pre-trading is as high as 34%. For instance, the FTX bankruptcy case revealed that its “pre-trading matching engine” was used to manipulate the price of SOL tokens 17 times. Currently, compliant exchanges only allow qualified investors to participate in pre-market trading, and the user threshold requires an account net asset value of over $1 million.
The technical solutions have not yet been popularized. Although the Bloomberg terminal can display institutions’ over-the-counter trading intentions (such as a potential $5 million buy order spread of 1.2%), ordinary users cannot access it. In 2024, the pre-trading oracle developed by Chainlink only covered the top 20 tokens, and the processing delay was still above 45 seconds. Although Coinbase Premium offers institutional block trading data boards, the subscription fee is as high as $299 per month, and the cost-effectiveness ratio for ordinary investors is less than 0.3.
Despite the limitations, investors can capture price signals through alternative solutions. Monitor the morning block trading of the top exchange Binance (the trading volume during UTC 06:00-08:00 usually accounts for 14% of the entire day), or analyze the activity of whale addresses on the chain (transfers over $100,000 have a correlation of 0.87 with the price in the next 3 hours). According to Kaiko’s research report, the liquidity changes in major stablecoin exchange pools 90 minutes before the official opening can predict 78% of the daily price direction.