Liquity accused of ‘market manipulation’ after Circle acquisition April Fools’

A crypto April Fool’s bit from protocol firm Liquity, which claimed it was being bought by stablecoin giant Circle, has led to allegations of “market manipulation” after it pumped the price of its in-house token.

Liquity announced on April 1 that it was acquired by Circle in a deal that would allow Circle to offer users “a non-freezable stablecoin and directly distribute yield under the Clarity Act.”

The joke pokes fun at Circle’s ability to freeze tokens and the fact that the Clarity Act, in its current form, seeks to ban yield on stablecoins.

Its freezing powers were ridiculed by the crypto investigator ZachXBT last week, who claimed Circle wrongly froze 16 wallets as part of a civil lawsuit.

Despite the buyout announcement being a joke on Liquity’s part, it still boosted its $LQTY token by 5%.

The price, however, pulled back in just a few minutes, and is now down 6% from its April 1 peak.

Crypto users on X weren’t too impressed with the joke, describing it as an “April Fool’s pump and dump.”

Some said it was an ultra-thin line between a joke and “market manipulation,” while others described the day as an opportunity to “do crime and it’s totally legal!”

Others were more forgiving. DeFi researcher Ignas said that crypto users were losing their minds over a “mere” 5% pump.

They added, “Good taste joke, IMHO. And good project.”

Other users warned not to base your trading on headlines, as on a day like April Fools’, most of them are “facetious.”

In response to the April Fools’ post, Liquity made it clear that it was just a joke, while also promoting its own stablecoin BOLD.

Additionally, Circle clarified to Protos that the announcement was false, and said “Circle has not acquired Liquity.”

The theme of crypto April Fools’ is phony acquisitions

There were at least two more fake crypto acquisitions announcements today. Crypto wallet firm Frontrun Pro announced that it had been acquired by AI giant Anthropic as part of a $141 million deal.

Crypto copy trading account PolyGun also announced that it had been acquired by Anthropic, this time in a transaction worth $69 million.

Dogecoin also did its own corporate April Fools’ joke, announcing that it would restructure the firm into “DogeCoin Financial Solutions LLC™.”

As part of this, it said it would drop its Shiba Inu logo for something navy blue, stop saying words like “wow,” “much,” and “very,” and rebrand its “Doge army” as “Stakeholders.”

Some users thought it would be funny to pretend that memecoin launcher Pump Fun is finally dropping an airdrop in the form of “Pump Fun rewards.”

The platform announced an airdrop would be coming “soon” 266 days ago.

Others joked that Bored Ape Yacht Club had replaced the images of all of its NFTs with photos of actual monkeys and chimps.

A bitcoiner called Didi Taihuttu claimed, while wearing his Bitcoin hat and strutting around a luxury villa, that he would be switching back to traditional banks after crypto had become too volatile.

All these examples demonstrate that trading headlines on a day like today is risky business, and that firms with financial assets to their names should be careful about just what kind of April Fools’ they run.