The Foin projection — which is behind the eponymous token that sunk following its supposed unlocking period at the beginning of January — has released an official explanation of the token'due south tanking afterwards the purported price pump.

Cointelegraph reported in an investigation on Dec. 30, 2022 that nosotros had found a trail of suspicious movements in Foin's (FOIN) toll history, besides as a web of suspect concern relationships associated with the coin'due south development.

As revealed by our investigation, there are multiple entities associated with Foin, like the Swiss-registered Foin Foundation, crypto payments firm and wallet provider FoPay, and AliExchange. FoPay is owned and operated past Ukraine-registered visitor "Foins Blockchain Express Liability Company."

That registration reveals that the founder of Foins Blockchain is Moldova-based Dmytro Lunhu, and the director is Ukrainian citizen Yevhen Petelin. According to Foin'southward official blog, the CEO of FoPay is Ruslan Salatov.

So what happened?

On Jan. 10, Foin made its starting time official annunciation of the yr, explaining why the cost dropped. The blog post stressed that the founding team can neither control the token price nor recover any losses once the tokens are distributed:

"Once a coin is on the exchanges, the team who launched the coin now has no control over what the prices are, and cannot recover any losses, no thing how much they would want to spring in and assistance."

The postal service described a list of factors that could have contributed to the price drib. This included supply and need of Foin, lack of proper financial educational activity for the projection's early on contributors, as well as Telegram scammers: the annunciation claimed that numerous scams were reported in both official and unofficial Telegram chats, in which investors had fallen victim to "scammers that duped them into handing over their FOIN."

It remains unclear which of the aforementioned parties associated with the projection authored the explanatory annunciation.

Foin price drops ahead of resuming withdrawals

In Dec, FoPay had acquired Estonia-based digital currency trading platform AliExchange for 1 million Foin tokens. If one were to go past Foin's apparent value at the time, that would brand the deal worth roughly $two.1 billion — a highly questionable valuation.

The token came into existence in late July 2022 at a price around $400, gradually gaining value throughout 2022 until a sharp uptick from $1,492 on Nov. i, 2022, to around $2,574 on Dec. 15, 2022, when the company unveiled the substitution acquisition and told users they could no longer withdraw their money.

Since that announcement, Foin cost surged fifty-fifty higher to around $iii,640 on Dec. 23, representing a virtually lxx% month-over-month price increase.

However, by Jan. 1, 2022, the token'south price dropped dramatically to $1,454, before continuing to refuse by over 99% to the current $4.74 per money.

Dependence on other cryptos could be a leading factor, says Foin

It is worth noting that Foin also named the surly crypto market as one of the primal factors of the token price slump, elaborating that altcoins' value is primarily tied to the price of Bitcoin (BTC) and Ether (ETH).

Every bit Cointelegraph previously reported, Bitcoin presented historically low volatility over the past year. Coupled with a lower correlation with altcoins, there are emerging signs that the market place could start to behave in a more predictable way.

BTC one-year price movements

BTC ane-year toll movements. Source: Coinmarketcap

Foin one-year price movements

Foin 1-year toll movements. Source: cmc.io

Bitcoin has furthermore go more valuable due to a number of factors, like the tensions betwixt the The states and Iran, or the launch of Bitcoin options trading past CME Group.

As such, Foin price should have followed the upturn in BTC cost but has continued trending downwardly.

Finally, Foin also called out attributed investor behavior:

"On Jan 3rd, 2022, later all, coins were fully distributed, the exchanges where FOIN was listed were flooded with people trying to sell FOIN. For example, one of the exchanges where FOIN is listed, P2PB2B, has even had serious technical difficulties and had to perform a organization upgrade due to the large number of people signing upwardly and depositing FOIN in their platform."

What's side by side?

The Foin squad ostensibly intends to rescue its token price. The projection plans to seek out new partnerships with fiscal service providers, list its token on more exchanges, consider integration with a peer-to-peer lending platform, and implement an airdrop and bounty plan, among other tactics.

Wallet provider FoPay volition ostensibly continue onboarding new merchants, create a merchant directory, and enable credit cards to be fastened to users' FoPay accounts.

Cointelegraph reached out to all the associated parties for comment but has not received a response as of printing time.