12 February, 2020 | AtoZ Markets – Bitcoin blockchain’s publicly auditable design is one of its strengths and weaknesses. It imposes precise obfuscation techniques for bitcoiners who are anxious to preserve their privacy. But it allows the community to receive real-time alerts about market events. It is like scammers who move large amounts of bitcoins, presumably on their way to exchange to liquidate.
May PlusToken Drop Bitcoin Price Temporarily by Dumping?
The bitcoins locked in the PlusToken wallet are again in motion, as shown by another "whale" transfer. A whale transaction was identified as most likely belonging to the PlusToken scheme, signaling that there were still active members of the project. This transaction took place just days after Bitcoin recovered more than $ 10,000.
The 11,999 BTC transaction is now worth more than $ 120 million. PlusToken is known to move its coins into relatively smaller transactions, liquidating them through Huobi.
Plustoken is believed to have received up to $ 3 billion in cryptocurrency, largely from Chinese investors. They were duped into believing that this scheme would allow them to get paid in perpetuity. The scale of the scam was such that 1% of bitcoin’s circulating supply drawn. It is propelling prices to more than $ 13,000 per coin at the height of the Plustoken bubble last year.
Dovey Wan, co-founder of Primitive Crypto, has confirmed the origin of the coins. Wan has been tracking the scam for months, helping to bridge the gap between the Chinese crypto space and Twitter. As PlusToken operated mainly in China, its presence did not detect by social media or the media for months. But the scheme has potentially affected the bitcoin markets for months.
This time, the wallet sent a large sum to a brand new, unknown address. This move could be part of PlusToken's desire to conceal the origin of its coins, as well as to liquidate part of the immense haul. In the past, PlusToken has successfully influenced the market by selling some of its hauls in open exchanges.
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PlusToken Scam
The movements of the coin can exacerbate the history of bitcoin dumping. But PlusToken moved and stored the coins in new cold wallets. The exact holdings of PlusToken are unknown but monitored by several cryptocurrency startups. Blockchain Center counts around 200,000 BTCs belonging to the scheme, which surpasses the cold storage of the Winklevoss brothers. The wallets also consolidate outputs from previous transactions, moving the UTXOs to a new address.
The scam started in February 2018, when the Plustoken white paper published, and by summer 2019. 187,000 BTC had accumulated by the project. In June, six Chinese citizens suspected behind this scheme arrested in Vanuatu. The Plustoken servers were shut down. In August, Plustoken members were still at large attempt to mix massive quantities of coins through the Wasabi Wallet before transferring most of the coins to Huobi.
PlusToken is also popular for using coin mixers, to lightly veil some of its possessions. So far, despite Huobi's sales, no coins have blocked, and no new identities have discovered.
While the remaining Plustoken bitcoins, if liquidated, should mark the end of BTC's sales pressure, there remains the other cryptocurrency that the team has accumulated to consider. Another 175 million dollars’ worth of ETH may remain under Plustoken's control. It is another time bomb that could make a hole in the market if liquidated.
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