Apollo (APL) coin goes to the moon and back again

Over the course of the last few weeks, Apollo coin saw a massive 400% growth in market cap followed by a swift decline back down to earth, leading to allegations it was a pump and dump scheme.

At the moment, the biggest volume exchange for Apollo tokens is the BTC pair at Bitmat. This spot market trades close to $1 million a day.

I wonder how much an insider would have needed to set aside to entice FOMO investors to take part in the meteoric ascent from four all the way up to 16 Satoshis per Apollo token.

A prior warning on Reddit

Reddit user RozzyPoffle claimed that he “tried to warn everyone two days ago. But now here we are, it’s too late, the team has cashed out.”

In a tirade towards the Apollo team, Rozzy recounted “the way they censored their social channels/Telegram, how they encouraged their members to stock up and BUY and banned anyone who talked about selling instantly. How they actively pumped up the price of their coin the past couple of weeks through fake news and shill armies.”

The Telegram channel for the project has 64,000 members. Assuming 50% are bots, that is still a lot of people that the scammers could go after.

Down over 70%

Rozzy talked of how he discovered that “suddenly tens of millions of APL were hitting all exchanges all at once in a massive dump that sent the price shooting down over 70%.”

After doing some “chain analysis,” he managed to find wallet addresses linked to the Apollo team. Several of the accounts had around a billion APL (around $200,000), with the other wallet addresses, having tens of thousands worth of illicit funds.

“The only people who own anywhere near this much are the Apollo team (and possibly John McAfee, lol).”

Rozzy rounded off the post by stating: “It seems very obvious to anyone watching the Telegram that he is trying to cover his tracks by buying up back to a reasonable price, so the price of APL dropping 78% in 1 minute earlier doesn’t seem apparent.”

At the time of writing, the Apollo coin has a market cap of close to $35 million.

Doing too much or just a scam ‘decentralised’ project?

The token claims that they are utilising a community of world-class developers, managers, marketers, researchers, and the Apollo community “to accomplish the goal of making Apollo the most technologically advanced, feature-rich currency on the market.”

This seems like a very broad goal to achieve. Most projects in this space have a more clear focus or USP. Is this a pump and dump or was this whole thing just another scam project?

The top reply to the accusations on Reddit is simply: “Live by the sh*tcoin, die by the sh*tcoin.”