Manchester United Fan Token (MUFC) is a dead coin and not related to the sports franchise, but one Elon Musk tweet appeared enough to revive it on August 17, 2022.
Also, I’m buying Manchester United ur welcome
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 17, 2022
For clarity, MUFC is not an official Manchester United crypto token. It came to life in August 2021 after a team of programmers, who are said to be hardcore Manchester United fans, falsely claimed that holding MUFC would give buy influence on the football club’s decisions.
Later, the team conducted an ‘airdrop’ round of 10,000,000,000 MUFC in November 2021, promising to offer 10,000 MUFC to users who followed its official social media handles. The prospects of getting free MUFC tokens enabled its price to rally to as high as $1.
Other Manchester United-related assets also rallied after Musk’s tweet and Manchester City’s fan tokens.
But the project turned out to be vaporware, in the end leading MUFC down by 100% after November. It was deemed extinct until a tweet from Tesla CEO Elon Musk on August 17 revived it from oblivion.
The billionaire entrepreneur tweeted that he would acquire the Manchester United football club which he later said was a “long-running joke.”
No, this is a long-running joke on Twitter. I’m not buying any sports teams.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 17, 2022
Nevertheless, the message sent the financial assets related to Manchester United soaring, including its stock MANU, which gained 1.97% in pre-market trading, and Tezos (XTZ), the club’s official blockchain and training partner, whose market valuation gained by $138.85 million.
Even Manchester City’s official crypto token, CITY, popped higher by almost 14% to reach $7 per piece after Musk’s tweet, despite Manchester City being a different football club.
On the flip side, MUFC surged by more than 3,000% hours after Musk’s tweet about purchasing Manchester United, according to data fetched by CoinPaprika.com.
Manchester United Fan Token Has Zero Liquidity
The MUFC rally seems to be price manipulation due to the extremely poor liquidity and volume.
Interestingly, in the past 24 hours, MUFC had been trading just against two crypto assets: USDT and WBNB. While the liquidity for the WBNB/MUFC pair was a meagre $106.84, it was even lower for the USDT/MUFC pair at about $10, according to data from PancakeSwap, a decentralized exchange.
In the meantime, the net volume that underpinned MUFC’s 3,000% rally was nearly $39,000 in the past 24 hours, suggesting that fewer traders are behind the major upside movement.
Therefore, just a few speculators might have used MUFC’s poor liquidity to pump the token artificially. The number of people who purchased the false upside narrative remains quite unclear, but given that MUFC has already plunged by 50% from its local top, the prospect that its rate would plunge to zero is high.
In the meantime, the incident reasserts Elon Musk’s strong influence on the cryptocurrency market, mostly on memecoins like Dogecoin.
