

The team behind Foin token have been suspected of being a scam. Recently they have published an explanation of a drastic price drop, after the expected unlocking period of the token in early January and steep price rise.

On December 31, 2019, CryptoTheNews published an investigation which revealed some suspicious tracks behind the price of Foin (FOIN), as well as network of business organizations related to the token development.

The scam investigation lists Foin Foundation, registered in Switzerland, AliExchange, a cryptocurrency exchange, and Ukrainian blockchain-based payments firm FoPay, owned and operated by ”Foins Blockchain Limited Liability Company”.

The registration data shows, that Foins Blockchain was founded by Dmytro Lunhu, based in Moldova, and now the company is controlled by Ukrainian citizen Yevhen Petelin. Foin’s official blog names Ruslan Salatov the CEO of FoPay.

So, what happened to the price?

On January 10 Foin made their first official announcement in 2020, which provided an analysis of the price drop. The team stressed that they can not control the price or recover the losses after the coin distribution:

”Once a coin is on the exchanges, the team who launched the coin now has no control over what the prices are, and cannot recover any losses, no matter how much they would want to jump in and help.”

Analyzing the Foin price drop, the team outlined several reasons for it. They are bearish crypto market, inconsistence between supply and demand of Foin, lack of proper financial education of early contributors, and scammers operating in official or unofficial Telegram chats. The scammers ”duped [investors] into handing over their FOIN”, thus significantly impacting the market price.

The organization which published the announcement, is not defined.

Foin price drops before withdrawals resume

In December 2019 FoPay acquired AliExchange in a deal worth 1 million FOIN (approximately $2.1 billion, if considering Foin’s value at the time of the deal), which is a highly questionable evaluation.

The token appeared on the market in late July 2018 costing $400 at its ICO. Its price rose gradually throughout 2019 until a sharp jump from $1,492 on November 1 to some $2,574 on December 15, when FoPay announced acquisition and told users that withdrawals are suspended.

Following the announcement, Foin price saw a sharp uptick to around $3,640 on December 23, which is approximately 70% month-over-month price increase.

However, on January 1 the token’s price plunged drastically to $1,454 and then continued to fall to the current $4.71 per token.

Dependence on other cryptos could be crucial, states Foin

As we previously stated, one of reasons leading to the Foin price decline is bearish crypto market. The report noted, that the value of the altcoin is pegged to the price of a coin it is exchanged for, primarily Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH).

Over the last year Bitcoin presented historically low volatility. Combined with a lower correlation with altcoins, it signals that the market is gradually becoming more predictable.

Now Bitcoin has become more valuable due to tensions between the U.S and Iran, and recent launch of new Bitcoin options by CME.

Taking this into consideration, we should have expected that Foin would follow Bitcoin, but it continued to sink.

Finally, Foin addressed investor’ behavior:

“On January 3rd, 2020, after all, coins were fully distributed, the exchanges where FOIN was listed were flooded with people trying to sell FOIN. For example, one of the exchanges where FOIN is listed, P2PB2B, has even had serious technical difficulties and had to perform a system upgrade due to the large number of people signing up and depositing FOIN in their platform.”

What can we expect?

The Foin team purportedly plans to recover their coin price. The measures include new partnerships with financial service providers, rolling out the token on more exchanges, P2P lending platform integration and bug bounty and airdrop programs.

FoPay will purportedly continue to onboard new merchants, create a market place akin to a merchant directory, and enable direct payments with PayPal.