A filing for a BlackRock Inc. fund based on the cryptocurrency XRP showed up on the official Delaware website that registers investment trusts incorporated in the state, triggering a brief rally in the token. The only problem is that BlackRock wasn’t the one who submitted it.
The Delaware Department of State’s Division of Corporations website — which lists some other trusts the asset manager has applied for previously — showed details for something called the “iShares XRP Trust” registered to BlackRock on Monday. A spokesperson for the asset manager, however, confirmed that it’s false.
XRP briefly spiked almost 13% as news about the fake filing made its rounds on X, the social-media platform formerly known as Twitter. It gave back those gains to trade lower on the day. The token is one of the largest cryptocurrencies — ranking fifth on the CoinGecko website — though it’s lesser known than Bitcoin and Ether.
A representative for the Delaware Department of State did not respond to requests for comment. It wasn’t immediately clear how the false BlackRock information ended up on the website.
It’s seemingly the latest incident of false news spreading quickly online within the crypto community, where excitement is running high that US regulators may soon approve an exchange-traded fund that would directly hold Bitcoin. The prospect of this development has been hyped up by many traders and has been a major factor behind Bitcoin’s recent rally to around $37,000 from roughly $25,000 in mid-June.
The hoaxes come with real-life consequences: Token prices tend to move precipitously on any incremental developments around possible crypto-centric ETFs and usually give up gains just as fast as they accumulated them. A false recent tweet proclaiming that the US Securities and Exchange Commission had approved a Bitcoin fund sent prices soaring before it was disproved.
Last week, BlackRock had filed for an Ether-based fund and the paperwork showed up on the same Delaware website as Monday’s filing. That one was real and helped send the price of Ether, the second-largest token, higher. The name for the same BlackRock contact was listed on both that real Ether and Monday’s fake XRP filings.
Read more: BlackRock Filing Spurs Ether Rally as ETF Bets Fire Crypto
“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,” said Bloomberg Intelligence analyst James Seyffart. “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.”
