Fake BlackRock fund filing causes XRP surge

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The price of Ripple’s XRP’ surged by 12 percent on Tuesday following the filing of a fake BlackRock iShares XRP Trust with the state of Delaware. As per a Bloomberg report, the Delaware Office of the Secretary of State has alerted the state Department of Justice about the fake filing.

The fake application was filed in Delaware on Monday. If authentic, this would have indicated an upcoming XRP ETF filing from BlackRock, similar to the one submitted last week for Ethereum by the $8.5 trillion asset manager. When news about the filing spread, the price of XRP, the fifth-largest digital asset, surged within just 30 minutes.

However, the price dropped when it was revealed that BlackRock had not been the one filing the application. XRP is currently priced at $0.62, marking a decrease of more than four percent in the last 24 hours, as per data retrieved by CoinGecko.

“This isn’t the best look for the crypto industry and definitely hurts the credibility of the good actors in the space, but it was sniffed out as fake pretty quickly,” said Bloomberg Intelligence analyst James Seyffart. “We saw a similar event last week that turned out to be real for the Ethereum trust. But an XRP ETF filing would be a bit of a stretch at this time.”

Currently, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is reviewing various ETF applications from major traditional finance firms. BlackRock has a pending Bitcoin ETF application with the Commission.

If authorized, the U.S. would have its inaugural spot Bitcoin ETF, enabling investors to access the token without purchasing or storing it directly.

For the last decade, the Wall Street regulator has rejected every Bitcoin ETF application it reviewed, citing concerns about market manipulation.

However, experts believe it is just a matter of time before Wall Street finally approves one. Bloomberg Intelligence analysts now estimate a 90 percent chance that the U.S. market will have a Bitcoin ETF by January 10.

SEC may approve Bitcoin ETFs by November 17

Seyffart said the SEC might approve around 12 pending Bitcoin ETF applications by November 17. The SEC recently extended the deadline for all Bitcoin ETF filings to November 18, and the comment period has just ended.

At the time of writing, there is no information on whether the SEC intends to approve any of the Bitcoin ETF applications.

Apart from BlackRock’s fake XRP trust name registration, there have been other instances of misleading news while the industry anticipates an ETF approval. In October, a fake report suggesting the SEC had approved BlackRock’s Bitcoin ETF application caused BTC’s price to surge by 10 percent.

At that time, the price of Bitcoin nearly reached $30,000. Its market cap also rose by four percent within 24 hours. Earlier, it had briefly reached $29,483, marking a 10 percent rise from the previous day’s trading price. Following Bitcoin’s rise, other major cryptocurrencies like Ethereum, Solana and Dogecoin also experienced price surges.

BlackRock later denied the news and explained in an email that the ETF filing was “still being reviewed by the SEC.” Bitcoin’s price then swiftly dropped again.