On Monday, the markets for cryptocurrencies saw a slump, with altcoins suffering significant losses. In the afternoon, things became worse when it was discovered that the iShares XRP Trust had a phoney corporate registration. When a document that looked like a Delaware corporation registry for the iShares XRP Trust was made public, the value of XRP experienced a temporary 10% increase. This paper resembled official BlackRock filings for exchange-traded funds (ETFs) that track spot bitcoin (BTC) and ether (ETH). A BlackRock representative refuted any link to the filing, however, and XRP’s gains were lost. The cryptocurrency is now down 1.8% for the last day.
The bogus report worsened the already unstable cryptocurrency market. SOL, the altcoin that had sparked the surge by more than tripling in value in less than a month, saw an 8% decline in value in the last day. AVAX and LINK lost more than 10% and 13% of their value, respectively, and Cardano, Polkadot, and Dogecoin (DOGE) also saw 5-7% declines. Bitcoin also hit a session low, falling to about $36,500 after losing almost 2% of its value over the day. ETH gave up its earlier gains, staying unchanged over the last day and keeping its value over the critical $2,000 mark.
