The price of Ripple’s XRP briefly jumped 13% on Monday after a fake filing, supposedly from investment firm BlackRock Inc., was posted on an official government website in Delaware.
As reported by Bloomberg, something called the ‘iShares XRP Trust’ appeared on the Delaware Department of State’s Division of Corporations website. The portal is where all investment trusts incorporated in the state are registered.
The news of the filing was quickly shared on social media and the price of XRP duly spiked. However, the filing was quickly outed as a fake by a BlackRock spokesperson, and by the end of the day, the crypto’s price plummeted.
It’s not currently clear who submitted the listing in BlackRock’s name.
According to Bloomberg Intelligence analyst James Seyffart, “This isn’t the best look for the crypto industry and definitely hurts the credibility of the good actors in the space, but it was sniffed out as fake pretty quickly.”
“We saw a similar event last week that turned out to be real for the Ethereum trust. But an XRP ETF filing would be a bit of a stretch at this time,” he added (via Bloomberg).
Another fake fund involving BlackRock
This isn’t the only erroneous media report about a supposedly imminent crypto product involving BlackRock that’s affected markets in the past few weeks.
Nearly $100 million worth of positions were liquidated in October after false reports of an approved spot Bitcoin Exchange Traded Fund (ETF) sent the currency’s price soaring before a hasty correction brought it back to Earth.
Read now: Crypto X keeps getting the Bitcoin ETF wrong
In a now-deleted article, crypto outlet Cointelegraph reported that the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) had approved an iShares spot Bitcoin ETF managed by BlackRock.
Cointelegraph posted on X (formerly Twitter) “BREAKING: SEC APPROVES ISHARES BITCOIN SPOT ETF.” The post was then edited to include the word “REPORTEDLY,” before the outlet deleted it altogether.
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Source: https://protos.com/fake-blackrock-trust-news-pumps-and-dumps-xrp/