Hedera USD (HBAR) highlights crypto fault lines as it plunges 26% after gaining over 100%

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Written on Apr 24, 2024

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It's been an eventful day and a half for cryptocurrency Hedera.
The coin's price more than doubled yesterday, only to plummet over 26% this morning - and it's still falling.
Looks like Hedera has just handed detractors with their latest use case in why cryptos are not to be trusted.

Misunderstandings and misplaced bullishness have led to a rollercoaster ride for Hedera Hashgraph (HBAR) in the past 24 hours.

The crypto coin’s price soared more than 105% yesterday on April 23^rd during trading hours, only to tumble rapidly by more than 20% afterwards.

Today, Hedera is still trading higher than yesterday’s opening price of $0.090412, having opened at $ 0.156441 today.

However, it has already fallen from its high of $0.18025 in early hours trading to just $0.132002 at the time of this article’s writing – a drop of more than 26% in just a few hours. But why?

Hedera BlackRock news

The HBAR Foundation posted to Twitter/X yesterday, saying that “BlackRock’s ICS US Treasury money market is tokenized on hedera… marking a major milestone in asset management by bringing the world’s largest asset manager on-chain”.

Within hours, the post had garnered over 2 million views, and crypto enthusiasts had taken the comment to mean that Hedera was announcing that BlackRock had chosen to tokenize the BlackRock ICS US money market fund (MMF) on the Hedera blockchain.

However, BlackRock had done no such thing, and was not directly involved at all. Rather, the Twitter post was referencing the fact that the BlackRock MMF was now available as a tokenized fund share on Hedera, as well as Archax and Ownera.

Its overly grandiose wording of ‘making history’ seemed to have led to the confusion, which was partially cleared up by an Archax blog news post that same day:

Archax… today announced expanding the range of fund shares it offers in tokenized form with the provision of the BlackRock ICS US Treasury money market fund. This additional BlackRock MMF, along with existing offerings, are all available directly on the Archax platform, as well as through connected networks. The first transaction of tokenized shares of the BlackRock MMF, which was also tokenized on Hedera… was completed”

Hedera backlash

Needless to say, social media has not been kind about HBAR Foundation’s ambiguous phrasing.

Chris O (TheOCCryptobro), for example, clarified things with his own statement:

Blackrock the actual institution did not select HBAR for tokenizing a fund of theirs. Blackrock had no involvement whatsoever and has no connection to the protocol. What did happen was a HBAR project through the secondary market tokenized shares of a Blackrock fund. Much like I can buy a Rolex take a pic and post it on my X account. Doesn’t mean Rolex ‘partnered with me.”

Everything wrong with crypto

Unfortunately, these events may well have just handed anti-cryptocurrency spokespeople – including individuals as influential as Jamie Dimon, regulators and Federal Reserve presidents – their latest ammo against BlockChain and cryptocurrencies.

Hedera’s recent rapid ascent to more than double its price in a matter of a few hours, only to come crashing down again in just as short a time based on fake news and non-events, is exactly the kind of anchorless volatility detractors accuse cryptocurrencies and DeFi of having.