How a Single Tweet Wiped $90 Million off Waltonchain’s Market Cap

Digital marketing guides are filled with cautionary tales of social media faux pas that have caused brand suicide. All it takes is an insensitive tweet from a marketing intern to leave a corporation groveling and its stock in the doldrums. It turns out that the world of cryptocurrency isn’t so different. After sending and hastily deleting an erroneous tweet, Waltonchain saw its market cap plummet by $90 million in the aftermath.

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The Cryptocurrency Giveaway That Was an Inside Job

Unlike the fake giveaways offered by lookalike Twitter accounts every single day, Waltonchain actually was giving away cryptocurrency – 2.14 WTC to 100 random winners as part of a Valentines’ Day campaign. As anyone who’s studied cryptography will know, genuine randomness is hard to attain. There are entire textbooks dedicated to the art of randomly generating numbers in ways that are unpredictable. Somehow, it seems, one of Waltonchain’s lucky winners just so happened to be a Waltonchain employee. The incident would have gone unnoticed, had the staffer then not tweeted their delight at winning – from the official Waltonchain account.

The tweet was hastily deleted, but not before it had been capped and gleefully shared all over Twitter. While Twitter traders/trolls had a field day, WTC started to dump, shedding $90 million over the next 24 hours. While not directly harming the company, the drop was a clear indicator of how the community felt about the deception. Shamed into action, Waltonchain was forced to issue an official response to “the recent Twitter incident”, explaining how “A Waltonchain team member was among the winners and excitedly tweeted using the wrong profile”. The core of this explanation is probably true, but the excuse is disingenuous; no Waltonchain employee, already holding a stack of WTC, would find themselves overcome with excitement at being the recipient of $50 of crypto.

Waltonchain’s Self-Love

No lasting damage is likely to have been done to WTC’s valuation or to the company’s reputation on account of the misfiring #WaltonchainLove Campaign. It was, after all, only a modest giveaway in which one out of 100 winners seems to have been an internal employee. In fact, one conspiracy theorist has postulated that the entire affair was a publicity stunt by Waltonchain. That seems outlandish, but stranger things have happened. Regardless of where the truth lies, the incident reaffirms something cryptocurrency users have known for years: never trust – verify.

Do you think Waltonchain made an innocent mistake or was this a deliberate ploy to get attention? Let us know in the comments section below.

Images courtesy of Shutterstock, Coincodex, and Moonoverlord.

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