On February 25, ABBC Coin, an obscure token issued by Belarus-registered and Dubai-based ABBC Foundation, was trading at around 0.10 USD according to Coinmarketcap. On March 7, the token hit a price level of 0.62 – a fivefold increase in just 10 days!
Even by the heady standards of the great crypto gold rush in 2017, that is an outstanding increase helping the token catapult into the top 30 on Coinmarketcap and boasting a market cap of close to 250 million USD.
ABBC Coin Price History
Source: Coinmarketcap
While in recent weeks, Binance Coin (BNB) has hogged all the limelight in the crypto universe with its price tripling in less than three months and leading the token in its surge up the top 10 crypto rankings, this silent crypto project has been quietly going to the moon.
But before you decide to invest your life savings and go all-in on ABBC Coin, it’s probably worth taking a deeper look into the project and what could possibly be driving the rally.
The ABBC Foundation claims in its website and ICO Whitepaper to be building a blockchain powered e-commerce platform where facial recognition will be used for identifying users. The foundation’s token ABBC Coin will be used for making payments for transactions on the platform.
Interestingly, at the time of the launch of the ICO the foundation and the token were named Alibabacoin Foundation and Alibabacoin respectively.
While the entity has nothing to do with the Chinese e-commerce giant, it is possible that a large number of gullible investors invested in the ICO in the belief that the coin is associated with Jack Ma’s Alibaba Group. This could have led to the price surge during the ICO when the coin rose from 0.35 to 1.62.
ABBC Coin Price History Oct 2018
Source: Coinmarketcap
Alibaba, however, was swift to react to protect its trademark and sued Alibabacoin Foundation for copyright infringement which was upheld at a U.S. court. Alibabacoin was forced to drop the ‘Alibaba’ name and renamed itself as ABBC.
Since then the price of ABBC Coin tumbled by more than 95% and was trading in the range of 0.03-0.10 USD.
That all changed in the last week of February.
The first point to note is that there have been no recent developments or breakthroughs reported by the company which could plausibly explain the move.
Secondly, the credibility of the project and the team is highly questionable. The whitepaper and the website are poorly written with a number of grammatical errors and vague sentences. Although the current roadmap presented on the website looks different, in an earlier version of the roadmap circulating on Reddit, it contains such gems as “2019 4Q: ABBC market cap reaches 140 billion USD”. Moreover, the team seems to consist of a motley collection of developers completely unknown to the crypto community.
Thirdly, even though ABBC Coin raised only USD 3.5 million in the ICO, the daily volume has been averaging over USD 30 million which is more than the volume traded in more established tokens such as IOTA and Cardano.
All this leads to only one logical conclusion.
Based on the fundamentals of the project, there is a high possibility that the rally is entirely fake. The scarcely believable volumes could only be a result of wash trading designed to prop up the ABBC Coin price to the moon.
What lends credibility to this theory is the airdrop of 500,000 ABBC Coins that the ABBC Foundation conducted on Coinbene, a Singapore registered exchange between February 20 and February 24. Immediately after the ICO ended, ABBC Coin started mooning leading to the 500% increase to its all-time high of 0.62 on March 7.
500000 ABBC Give Away on CoinBene Now https://t.co/Tb1OpPak5I
— CoinBene Global (@CoinBene) February 20, 2019
The crypto community was quick to spot the suspicious nature of the rally and several users have issued warnings to investors.
Pay With Your Face: ABBC Coin Spikes 132%, but Beware This Alibaba Imitator https://t.co/9uSZ4WePrt pic.twitter.com/R0nDlGyqV8
— afri suhargandhi (@ASuhargandhi) March 2, 2019
can we bring awareness that $ABBC is a SCAM and lobotomized individuals are buying it? retweet
— Poor Bitcoiner (@poorbitcoiner) March 7, 2019
A sharp correction (‘the dump’) is likely to follow. In fact, the price is already down 25% from the all-time high at the time of writing and is trading at 0.46. It won’t be a surprise if the price is back to less than 0.10 before the end of the month.
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Disclaimer: The information contained in the article is not trading or investment advice. It is intended for educational and entertainment purposes only. Please do your own research or speak to a registered financial adviser before investing.
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