The cryptocurrency market collapsed after a bad joke about Ethereum

The cryptocurrency industry has reacted negatively to a joke about the insolvency of Ethereum (wETH) and has entered the «red zone.» It all started when the developer of the ERC-721A blockchain and token standard, Cygaar, published a joke post on Twitter over the weekend, claiming that wETH, an ERC-20 token based on Ethereum, would soon become insolvent.

ATTENTION: WETH is about to be insolvent.

I will begrudgingly bail out anyone holding WETH at a rate of 0.5 ETH per WETH in order to save this space. You can thank me once the crisis has been advertised.

— cygaar (@0xCygaar) November 26, 2022

Cygaar clarified that this was a prank to see if anyone was paying attention to his tweets. However, the crypto blogger’s joke went viral, especially after it was supported by Tron project founder Justin Sun and Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin. Quoting a tweet about «wETH's insolvency,» Justin Sun wrote that he «discussed the situation with my best friend Vitalik Buterin and together they are investing $ 2 billion in WEF.»

BREAKING: $WETH just lost its peg, CEO of The Wrapped Ethereum Foundation (WEF) @poordart frantically announced to raise and fill their $ 2b hole. pic.twitter.com/qN39yjYryz

— kinnif. weth (@0xkinnif) November 28, 2022

At the same time, a significant part of the Twitter crypto community did not pay attention to the fact that Justin Sun’s tweet actually contains the abbreviation of the World Economic Forum, not the name of the cryptocurrency wETH. As a result, Cygaar’s prank got out of hand and caused panic in the crypto market.

The anxiety surrounding wETH demonstrated that the market has become particularly susceptible to any negative news amid the events surrounding the collapse of the FTX cryptocurrency exchange. It should be added that at the time of writing, the leading altcoin ETH $2,991.80 Ethereum -4.74% Market capitalization $359.6 billion VOL. 24 hours $2.67 billion is trading at $ 1,207, which is 2.93% higher than the previous day. Ethereum’s market capitalization is $ 145.4 billion, and daily trading volume is $ 525.5 million.