This week on The Market Report, the resident experts at Cointelegraph discuss dozens of pump-and-dump tokens purporting to be related to ChatGPT and Bing AI chat. We will be doing things a little differently this week since our handsome and charming host, Joe Hall, will be somewhere over the Atlantic during the livestream and will not be able to join us. Not to worry, though, as our resident experts Marcel Pechman and Sam Bourgi are here, as always, to break down the latest news in the markets. Bitcoin bulls ignore recent regulatory FUD by aiming to flip $25K to support …

Cryptocurrency investors funneled as much as $4.6 billion into crypto tokens suspected to be part of “pump and dump” schemes in 2022. A Feb. 16 report from blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis “analyzed all tokens launched” in 2022 on the BNB and Ethereum blockchains and found just over 9,900 bore characteristics of a "pump and dump" scheme. A pump-and-dump scheme typically involves the creators orchestrating a campaign of misleading statements, hype, and Fear Of Missing Out (FOMO) to persuade investors into purchasing tokens while secretly selling their stake in the scheme at inflated prices. Chainalysis estimated investors spent $4.6 billion worth …

Serum, a "decentralized exchange" on the Solana blockchain, has performed exceptionally well in terms of its SRM token price, despite it ties to the defunct FTX exchange. SRM price up 140% in one week On the daily chart, the SRM/USD pair has gained 140% in the last seven days, hitting $0.319 on Nov. 21 versus $0.177 on Nov. 14. This pushed the circulating market cap to about $73 million and "fully diluted market cap," the market cap if the maximum supply was in circulation, to nearly $2.8 billion. "Closer to zero" SRM price rallied despite the ongoing delisting of Serum …

The recent concerns related to the volatility of FTX Token (FTT) seeped into FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried’s other business operation, Alameda Research, as the BitDAO community requested information about Alameda’s BitDao (BIT) holding commitment. On Nov. 2, 2021, BitDAO swapped 100 million BIT tokens with Alameda in exchange for 3,362,315 FTT tokens with a public commitment to hold each other’s tokens for three years, so until Nov. 2, 2024. Given the rising uncertainties and speculations, the BitDAO community was quick to react to the sudden fall of BIT prices on Nov. 8, 2022, suspecting Alameda of dumping the BIT tokens …

Crypto influencer Lark Davis has refuted new allegations from Twitter “on-chain sleuth” ZachXBT of shilling “low cap projects” to his audience “just to dump them shortly after.” Davis was responding to a Twitter thread posted by Zach on Sept. 29, containing allegations that he profited over $1.2 million through selling tokens from crypto projects which he was allegedly paid to promote without disclosing. In a 17-part thread, Zach pointed to eight examples of what is supposedly Davis’ crypto wallet receiving tokens from new crypto projects, with Davis subsequently tweeting or posting a video on them, and then selling the tokens …

Crypto lending platform Celsius Network has an approximately $1.2 billion gap in its balance sheet, with most liabilities owed to its users. In addition, the firm has filed for bankruptcy protection, so its future looks bleak. Still, Celsius Network's native utility token CEL has soared in valuation by over 4,100% in the last two months, reaching around $3.93 on Aug. 13 compared to its mid-June bottom of $0.093. In comparison, top coins Bitcoin (BTC) and Ether (ETH) rallied 40% and 130% in the same period. Takeover rumors behind CEL explosion? Technically, the price rally made CEL an excessively valued token …

The native token for the embattled crypto brokerage Voyager Digital has skyrocketed in what seems to be a new effort to inflate its price seemingly inspired by the recent “CEL short squeeze.” On Wednesday, Voyager’s VGX token surged 178% to hit an intraday high of $0.891 before falling back to around $0.559, according to CoinGecko. It had regained ground back up to $0.717 at the time of writing. The price rise has coincided with the appearance of a Twitter hashtag called #PumpVGXJuly18, as well as the formation of a Telegram group called the “Voyager Community Recovery Channel,” which had more …

Terra's $40-billion experiment to create a functional "algorithmic stablecoin" project has failed drastically following its collapse in May. Nonetheless, its native stablecoin TerraClassicUSD (USTC), earlier called TerraUSD (UST), has been thriving in the past week. Dead stablecoin walking To recap, UST lost its U.S. dollar peg in May following mass withdrawals from Anchor Protocol, a lending and borrowing platform offering up to 20% yield to clients on their UST deposits. As of June 15, the token was almost worthless, trading at $0.005 at the Kraken crypto exchange. But USTC started recovering afterward, insomuch that its value per token almost reached …

Two QAnon-affiliated conspiracy theorist influencers allegedly caused their followers millions of dollars in losses by running a cryptocurrency pump-and-dump scheme. The pair reportedly persuaded their thousands of followers to invest in a crypto portfolio, presenting a misleading mix of conspiratorial and genuine content along with claims about institutions backing the tokens to generate hype and raise the price of the portfolio. The allegations are included in an investigation by Logically, a group of data scientists and developers. It reported the two influencers running the Telegram channels WhipLash347 and the Quantum Stellar Initiative (QSI) coordinated to promote lists of Stellar (XLM) …

The British overseas territory of Gibraltar introduced a new regulatory package for distributed ledger technology (DLT) service providers. The document elaborates on the responsibilities of crypto businesses in regards to threats of market manipulation and insider trading. On April 27, the government of Gibraltar published the 10th Regulatory Principle of the country's financial services regulation. The details are revealed in a Guidance Note, provided by the Gibraltar Financial Services Commission (GFSC), the chief finance regulator of the territory. The regulation, crafted by a special working group that included both government officials and industry experts, sets operational guidelines for preventing market …

Decred (DCR) prices soared by as much as 45% on April 18 before paring some gains as traders bet on a major hard fork that aims to prevent pump-and-dump schemes by miners. Key Decred network upgrade in three weeks DCR rallied by nearly 45% to over $86 in one day, its highest level in four months. Moreover, the massive upside move accompanied a similarly huge spike in its trading volumes, confirming that most traders backed the intraday bullish momentum. Traders flocked to buying Decred ahead of a key upgrade slated for early May that would reduce the DCR mining reward …

Neutrino Dollar (USDN), a stablecoin issued through Waves-backed Neutrino protocol, lost its U.S. dollar-peg on April 4 amid speculations that it could become "insolvent" in the future. USDN plunges 15% despite WAVES backing USDN dropped to as low as $0.822 on Monday with its market capitalization also diving to $824.25 million, down 14% from its year-to-date high of $960.25 million. Interestingly, the stablecoin's plunge occurred despite Neutrino's claims of backing its $1-peg via what's called "over collateral," i.e., when the total value of Waves (WAVES) tokens locked inside its smart contract is higher than the total USDN minted, also called …