The infamous Centra (CTR) coin scandal has yet again underlined the extreme difficulties regulators are facing while trying to clean up the cryptocurrency market.
Earlier in April 2018, Centra Tech, the US.-based FinTech startup behind the digital currency CTR, came under a crackdown from the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). According to the SEC, Centra Tech’s ICO duped thousands of millions of dollars by exaggerating its link to the corporate world.
Apparently, Sohrab “Sam” Sharma and Robert Farkas, the co-founders of Centra Tech, lured investors into investing in their ICO by claiming that the firm had tie-ups with MasterCard and Visa. However, neither of these two financial giants had any link with Centra.
They earlier also managed to get Floyd Mayweather, one of the greatest boxers to advise his followers ( 13.5 million) on Facebook to buy these tokens.
The controversy led to the arrest of both co-founders.
CTR – Still Trading
Shortly after the SEC’s announcement about the crackdown on Centra Tech, the price of CTR started plummeting (from $ 0.32 to $ 0.06). The price of the coin stabilized for awhile and then started rising again. It took another hit on April 8 when Binance officially delisted it, yet CTR continues to trade at $0.012.
Centra Price, from CoinMarketCap
“After proactively reaching out to the Centra Tech team to address our concerns and conducting thorough reviews of our findings, we have decided to delist the CTR token and the CTR/ BTC, CTR/ETH trading pairs from the Binance exchange,” read the statement issued by Binance.
“We will delist the CTR token on 2018/04/08 at 05:00 (UTC). Withdrawals of CTR tokens from Binance will continue to be supported until 05:00 (UTC) on 2018/05/05.”
Binance Delists Centra
Overall, at least three different exchanges have so far delisted the coin. By all standards, CTR should have already been on its death bed by now, but the fact that it still has a presence in the crypto-sphere shows that regulators will have to embark on an out-of-the-box approach to avoid such scenarios.
As of now, it is difficult to accurately predict the number of market participants, but according to CoinMarketCap, CTR had a volume of $81,000 + in last 24 hours.
The whole fiasco also proves the point that the SEC has more teeth while dealing with companies listed on stock exchanges. For example, NASDAQ recently paused the trading of Longfin Corp. following allegations that two key people affiliated with the firm had breached securities law by selling unregistered shares.
“We are in the process of responding to this document request and will cooperate with the SEC in connection with its investigation,” Longfin stated as its stock prices took a nosedive, falling nearly 31 percent to just $9.89 a share.
Such trading might essentially get more regulation involved in the cryptocurrency markets because people are still trading a token which SEC called a fraud ten days ago.
