A filing on the official Delaware website that registers investment trusts in the state appeared to indicate that asset manager BlackRock intended to launch an XRP-based fund.
The fund was named “iShares XRP Trust”, with the registered agent listed as Daniel Schweiger, the managing director at BlackRock. Bloomberg ETF analyst Eric Balchunas tweeted that the filing in question was fake, something executives from BlackRock confirmed to him and other publications after news began to spread.
This is false! Confirmed by BlackRock by me. Some whacko must have added using BlackRock executive name etc. Cmon man. pic.twitter.com/cDpnycYwjQ
— Eric Balchunas (@EricBalchunas) November 13, 2023
Still, in addition to causing a fair amount of confusion, the fake filing also impacted the price of XRP, which spiked over 12% to a high of $0.73 in just 30 minutes on Monday. The token rallied after a number of popular cryptocurrency analysts and some publications broke the news, in posts that have since been deleted.
Bloomberg’s James Seyffart took to X to clarify that despite the fake XRP filing, BlackRock’s Ethereum trust filing was very much authentic.
Lot of people now asking if the Ethereum trust filing was real after seeing the XRP trust was fake.
YES. The ishares #Ethereum trust filing is real and was confirmed via 19b-4 filing on Thursday. Only the XRP trust filing was fake. https://t.co/Lqhj8p91NO
— James Seyffart (@JSeyff) November 13, 2023
At the time of writing, some market participants were still arguing that the XRP filing could be real, given that it still hadn’t been delisted from the Delaware website in over 6 hours. XRP, however, had erased all of the gains from earlier in the day.
In the hour that followed news of the filing, XRP led the crypto market in terms of liquidations, with over $2.84 million liquidated over one hour, as per data from CoinGlass.
$XRP is leading in liquidations over the past hour.
Way to outperform. pic.twitter.com/5QXhWRmprt
— Emperor Osmo 🐂 🎯 (@Flowslikeosmo) November 13, 2023