According to theripplecryptocurrency.com there seems to have been an astoundingly blatant case of market manipulation conducted by a certain twitter user.
A tweet by @6BillionPeople, a user with 4.63 million followers interested in his cryptocurrency predictions and advice, sent the Verge cryptocurrency market into chaos on Christmas Day
The tweet followed an announcement on Reddit and caused the Verge Price to tank by nearly 70%, during Christmas dinner, which means that some people would have lost thousands when their limit-sells were triggered while tucking into their Christmas Turkey.
On the same day as the above tweet was posted, a new verge wallet was created, which quickly started buying up Verge, and now holds 14% of all Verge, worth half a billion dollars.
The Verge team later confirmed that there was no problem with the development of the currency, and that this was a blatant example of fake news.
@6BillionPeople claims that his twitter account was hacked, but given that he posted the same message on Patreon and Discord at the same time...it's quite a coincidence that all three were hacked simultaneously....
There's quite a furore on twitter about the issue!
I hold about 9K Verge, which is a relatively small amount, but I'm still glad this all washed over me, it's a great warning to be very very cautious about the advice being given out be even 'credible' investors.
What I'm not so glad about is that if this guy now holds even more Verge than before, and the market remains unregulated, surly this means he's now got even more of an opportunity to do it all over again?
It also raises the question of how do we trust our sources when it comes to advice.
Hopefully (begrudgingly?) Verge will bounce back!