Ah, just when we thought that market would be going upwards, it’s taken a bit of stumble again, falling back to $9,600 levels, much to everyone’s dismay. Still, things are not the worst, as the market has climbed back up over $10,000 and has $11,000 in its sights. 

But the question still remains as to what caused the market to make an unexpected drop like that - nobody was saying that it was going to go up and up continually without some corrections but the drop below $10,000 did seem odd. 

One possible cause of that, which I think is likely the culprit, is the $3 BILLION dollar Ponzi scheme that was brought to public attention by Primitive Ventures CEO Dovey Wan, saying that the project, PlusToken caused a large stream of sell-offs. Wan said that about 70k worth of Bitcoin and 800k worth of Ethereum were involved in the scam.

She goes on to describe how it worked: the scheme had a 4 layer member structure that offered different rates of rebate. She said that the police had been investigating the matter for 2 months but the funds seem irrecoverable because some people who hold the keys to the wallet have not been caught. The entire Twitter thread is well worth reading, as it gets into quite a lot of detail about the operation was conducted. As many as 10 million people may have been scammed.

This makes the PlusToken scheme the biggest single loss for crypto, which continues to be a problem for the industry, with multiple exchanges being hacked and users being scammed.