Walmart rattled the cryptocurrency market with no knowledge about how they got there in the first place. Last month, news was doing the rounds that Walmart is all set to announce a crypto partnership after they posted a job opening on their LinkedIn page looking to hire a 'Digital currency and cryptocurrency Product Lead'.
The job listing opened up a can of fake tweets about each coin 'day-dreaming' to be associated with Walmart's latest payment technology and one among them is Litecoin (LTC). A fake tweet that showed Walmart saying they're collaborating with Litecoin was picked up by top publications such as Reuters, Bloomberg and CNBC and Litecoin's official Twitter handle retweeted the news with joy.
Minutes later LTC's price spiraled upwards upto 27.4% with large trading volumes and became the hot topic in the cryptosphere. However, the sheer joy was short lived as Walmart in a press release refuted the claims announcing they have no tie-up with Litecoin.
''Walmart had no knowledge of the press release issued by GlobeNewswire and there is no truth to it. Walmart has no relationship with Litecoin,'' read the statement.
In less than five minutes after the statement was out, Bitcoin immediately dipped to -2.5% and experienced large sell-offs and dragged other coins down along with it. The domino effect of panic selling spread across the market and all coins traded in red while some even dipped to double digits.
The turbulence the market experienced yesterday due to a fake tweet shows that coins in market are hungry for the limelight and the developers would retweet any news they receive without double checking the facts, all this just to attract more investors. Also, the creator and M.D of Litecoin, Charlie Lee revealed to Bloomberg Technology that they ''screwed up'' after retweeting fake news.
''We try our best to not tweet fake news and this time we really screwed up and we will stop fake news from spreading,'' said Lee and continued, ''This morning I woke up and found out that Walmart is accepting Litecoin, and I was like, 'Wow that's awesome,' and it turned out to be fake."
Also, when questioned if LTC was ever in talks with Walmart before, Lee quipped, ''We didn't have a partnership," and added that anyone can start accepting Litecoin without having to talk with the organization first.
