April Fool's jokes in the crypto market

This April prank failed: on April 1, the content manager of Ethereum-based crowdfunding platform Juicebox announced a successful US$69 million funding round. The tweet referred to venture capitalist Paradigm.

Unfortunately, this round of funding never materialized. An hour after the tweet went live, "brileigh.eth" deleted the joke: "Happy April Fools day y'all!".

By then, however, the tweet had already had an effect: The price of the token JBX rose 12 percent after the announcement of the alleged funding round - and fell 15 percent after it became clear that it was a hoax. The Briliegh.eth account has since been set to private.

On X (formerly Twitter), people reacted to the April Fools' joke with incomprehension: "What was actually the point of the joke here?" asked one user, while others simply demanded, "Prison."

A similar incident occurred with the cryptoproject Waves. Its founder "Sasha" announced on X an integration with AI technologies: "Waves will be rebranded as an AI chain and the Waves ticker will be replaced by AI. Waves will also merge with GPT".

The share price rose five percent as a result, but quickly lost it again when it became clear that the tweet was not meant seriously. However, some users didn't feel like laughing: "The only thing it should be merged with is the FTX lawsuit because it's fraud."

BitMEX Research's April prank was relatively innocuous. In a tweet, the crypto trading platform stated that there had been no payouts from Grayscale's Bitcoin ETF. A short time later, the account clarified that more than US$300 million had flowed out of the ETF.