If you slept through crypto’s price action on Monday, you probably missed the incredible near 10% run-up and crash of $BTC, which all washed out in about 20 minutes:
The run up was in response to the following tweet from Cointelegraph that indicated that a Bitcoin Spot ETF was finally approved, which was then subsequently edited, and then ultimately removed:
https://cointelegraph.com/news/clarification-sharing-false-spot-bitcoin-etf-news
Reportedly this “mistake” was done by a Cointelegraph employee who jumped the gun after getting a fake report from a now-deleted Telegram account.
Here’s some of my initial takes of watching this whole thing unfold…
Yes there’s a "problem with society," but there’s a problem with Cointelegraph as well too.
In case if you haven’t seen the video, shortly after it was uncovered that the ETF story was fake, Kristina Lucrezia, Cointelegraph’s Editor-in-Chief, spoke about the situation while on a panel in Dubai:
In case if you have troubles with the audio, here’s the transcript: “…this is what happens when we are having constant pressure to be first with every news. This is not a problem with journalism per se, it’s a problem with society and all the technology…if you’re not the first, you’re the last.”
Although they came out with later with a full breakdown of how/why they screwed up which I appreciated, I think it’s incredulous that they used the “it’s a societal problem” argument in order to negate responsibility. Instead of immediately admitting their mistake and saying what efforts they would take to rectify things going forward, instead they blamed it literally on everyone else. I don’t consider myself a journalist by any means, but what I do know is that the bigger your audience, the more accountability and responsibility you should have to your readers. The reason why so many people got duped by the ETF news was specifically because it came out of Cointelegraph, an organization that’s supposed to be the foremost experts on all things blockchain and cryptocurrency.
Crypto Twitter isn’t that much better
Now CT on the otherhand are at best citizen journalists, but are just as quick to point fingers and simply…just make stuff up. I saw a tweet that was circulating around insinuating that Cointelegraph had opened up a 50x long position on Bitcoin moments prior to the run up, but if one were to do the math, it was obviously a fake:
Allegedly the initial tweet that Rollbit posted was in fact a joke, but that didn’t stop literally hundreds of thousands of people viewing the retweets as damning evidence demanding investigations. (And to be brutally honest, I thought that this was true too until I saw the math breakdown myself.)
There’s still a lot of leverage in the market
One of the major reasons why I think the Cointelegraph response irks me is because it completely disregards all the people that got hurt by this…and really for no good reason. In the span of just one hour, there was more than $100 million dollars worth of liquidations:
You could make the argument that crypto is risky and it’s all a gamble, but when the one of the few major crypto-native news sources screwing up is the reason why you’re getting rekt? I’ve seen Gary Gensler hearings that do better for the crypto-industry than Cointelegraph’s erroneous reporting.
Speaking of the SEC, this isn’t a good look for BTC ETFs.
This kind of pump-and-dump from errant news is one of the exact reasons why the SEC hasn’t approved a BTC ETF. Take a look at number (5) that Dylan LeClair highlights:
I would like to say that this was a one-off accident about the crypto market, but unfortunately that’s not the case. There are many instance about the crypto market getting duped, including but not limited to:
June 2017 — Vitalik Buterin death
July 2021 — Bitcoin accepted at Amazon
September 2021 — Litecoin accepted at Walmart
October 2021 — XRP allegedly dismissed
November 2021 — Bitcoin Cash accepted at Kroger’s
These of course, don’t even include the explicit scams that have surrounded crypto since it’s inception, but I digress, we’ve definitely been down this road before.
The market hasn’t priced the ETF in accurately
Now I’m by no means a market-expert, but most economists will most likely tell you that the inevitable BTC ETF should have been priced into the market already. In my opinion, yesterday’s market action clearly invalidates this. Since we don’t have institutional adoption yet, the10% run-up we saw yesterday was most likely from retail alone. If retail still has the power to run up 10% of its price in such a short time, I am very excited to see once we actually get legitimate news about a spot BTC ETF actually getting approved. If history proves to be any indicator, I’m hoping we can see similar action to Gold’s ETF, because once Gold’s ETF approved, it started going parabolic:
https://www.businessinsider.com/gold-etf-driving-gold-price-appreciation-2012-12
Once the gold ETF was introduced in November 2004, the price simply hasn’t stopped trending up. Like gold, $BTC is also a store of value, but additionally it’s also finite in supply, meaning that there’s little reason I can see for why $BTC can’t on an even bigger tear than gold did.
Conclusion
I’m pretty disappointed that yesterday’s news wasn’t real, because I’m sure like many others, I thought that maybe this was going to kick us out of the bear market that we’re currently in. As bullish as I am for crypto, I fear that this whole hoax/debacle will set us back even further. The silver lining? — At least this gives me more time to accumulate. 😁
Thanks for taking the time to read this and be sure to follow me on twitter (https://twitter.com/CryptosWith) to get all my latest updates. If you want to get access to all my draft links or get an idea about what’s next on my docket before I publish, find me on Friend.tech, where I share all that information in my chatroom. Also, looking for a gift for your Crypto-loving/hating friend? Give them a REKT journal to cheer them up!
Disclaimer: And as a final reminder, this is not financial advice and this is for educational and entertainment purposes only. Please as always, do your own research and find what investments are best for you. Cheers everyone!
