Crypto projects claim that advertising campaigns from CoinMarketCap (SMS) were fraudulent and led to a drop in the price of their tokens, writes Cointelegraph. Developers accuse SMS of being unfair in promoting their airdrops and claim that only a few wallets ended up with cryptocurrencies, indicating that the system could be manipulated. RBC Crypto.
CoinMarketСap is one of the largest cryptocurrency market data aggregators launched in 2013. The service collects information from most trading platforms, tracking the main metrics of tokens and crypto exchanges. In 2020, the platform was acquired by Binance.
Blockchain project SaTT told the publication that the SMS promotion, which was paid for in December 2022, ended up with 84% of the issued tokens reaching just 21 wallets. As part of the promotion, 25,000 winning addresses were to receive 4,000 SATT each. At that time, the price of the token was $6.30.
SaTT said that shortly after the airdrop, 20,900 addresses “automatically transferred the tokens to 21 wallets,” who a few days later sold the tokens for about $142,000. from the end of the airdrop on December 1st until the moment these wallets sold their tokens on December 10th.
The TokenBot project faced a similar problem. Its founder Sean Newsum revealed that he also airdropped on CMC. According to him, the platform has identified 30,000 airdrop winners. TokenBot first sent out its tokens to a batch of 4,000 winners, and about 3,300 of them ended up sending funds to one wallet. Newsum said that TokenBot lost about $20,000 as a result of the incident.
“Obviously, some person figured out how to play on CoinMarketCap. <...> If we sent a large batch, then this whole airdrop would be a complete disaster, ”said the head of TokenBot.
However, Newsum revealed that he had received an apology from CMC and was informed that the company was investigating the situation and would return with an updated list of project winners.
The SaTT project team claims to have discovered 18 more token and NFT airdrops totaling $6.6 million conducted by CMC since July 2022, which were also allegedly “infected with fraud.” These included projects such as TopGoal, OwlDAO and AgeofGods. SaTT suggested that either the hackers created a lot of fake accounts on the CMC, or that these were internal actions of the platform.
A spokesman for CMC responded to the allegations by saying that at least four projects, named SaTT, have not yet distributed rewards, which means it is “impossible” that they have encountered “malicious” activity. He also noted that apart from SaTT, AgeOfGods and TokenBot, no one else complained about such problems.
However, a CMC spokesperson acknowledged that there is a bot issue. According to him, the platform team is constantly working to improve their systems in order to limit this problem. To prevent bots from participating, SMS uses CAPTCHA verification and email verification, and plans to integrate two-factor authentication.
Stay in touch! Subscribe to CryptoNewsHerald.com at Telegram.
Comments (No)