POPCHAIN, which has caused controversies as ‘don’t ask listing’ and ‘strategic coin’, has been listed on a foreign cryptocurrency exchange. POPCHAIN is a cryptocurrency that saw its listing schedule postponed as it raised suspicious about scam while it was going through a listing process on Bithumb. Despite suspicions, $555,840 (600 million KRW) worth of POPCHAINs were dealt in just 3 hours.
POPCHAIN Foundation announced ‘POPCHAIN Cash (PCH)’ has been listed on an Asian cryptocurrency exchange called CoinBene on the 18th. About $110 million worth of trades take place daily through CoinBene. CoinBene supports markets based on Tether (USDT), Ethereum (ETH), and Bitcoin (BTC).
While CoinBene supports Chinese, English, Portuguese, Vietnamese, and Malaysian, it does not support Korean. Nevertheless, it held a listing event of POPCHAIN in Korean as if it was trying to reflect interests and controversies in South Korea.
Although POPCHAIN, which was dealt starting at noon, started at 0.00024 Ethereum, its price dropped 20% almost immediately. Within next 3 hours, its price was hovering over $0.13.
“We are planning to have POPCHAIN listed on South Korean exchanges by the first half of this year and global exchanges in the future.” said CEO Son Sang-won of POPCHAIN Foundation.
THE E&M, which is listed on KOSDAQ, was pushing to issue POPCHAIN. THE E&M is a company that operates BJ internet broadcasting platforms such as Popcorn TV and Celuv TV. POPCHAIN can also be used as type of ‘star balloon’ as THE E&M tied its contents business with POPCHAIN.
However, THE E&M did not go through ICO procedure, which is considered as one of basic requirements to list a cryptocurrency. Fact that 90% of coins issued focused on two wallets also raised suspicious. Because part of source code of POPCHAIN was confirmed to be exactly the same as that of a different cryptocurrency, industries and people were also suspicious about POPCHAIN’s technical skills.
Some even believed that some of representatives from Bithumb were working as POPCHAIN’s major development team. They are pointing out that Bithumb, which is one of the biggest exchanges in South Korea, was trying to forcefully list a cryptocurrency with lacking requirements to gain profits internally.
Due to many doubts and suspicious, Bithumb ultimately postponed listing process of POPCHAIN. It is planning to have POPCHAIN listed on Bithumb once it is listed on other exchanges first.
“Since there are so many controversies, we are going to go through more intense evaluation and verification processes for reverse ICO in the future and share more information with investors.” said Bithumb. “We are going to focus on establishing a democratic listing process and looking for coins with technical skills continuously with this issue as a learning curve.”
Staff Reporter Park, Jungeun | jepark@etnews.com & Staff Reporter Gil, Jaeshik | osolgil@etnews.com