But no evidence has surfaced that the players are gathering to coordinate buying of Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies. “Sophisticated players may be expert at hiding their identities.” We have seen credible leaks asserting that major market participants call meetings of the sector’s elite when they fear a crypto leader plans to make what they consider a reckless, industry-endangering move. “The space is bigger now so it’s harder to dig the data,” says Griffin. It’s important to note that no definitive proof of chicanery has so far emerged. Though manipulation is unproven, the signs are troubling “In a period of highly negative sentiment, we’ve seen suspiciously solid floors under Bitcoin.” “If you’re a crypto manipulator, you want to set a floor under the price of your coin,” added Griffin. “The same mechanism we saw in 2017 could be at play now in the still unreal Bitcoin market.”įor Griffin, the way normally super-volatile Bitcoin went calm and stable in the stormiest of times for crypto fits a scenario where boosters are uniting to support and juice its price. “It’s very suspicious,” Griffin told Fortune. Almost unbelievably, as the crypto market has continued to unravel into 2023, Bitcoin has gone in the opposite direction, trading up 35% since Jan. Despite the crypto crash and myriad other negative forces, every time Bitcoin briefly breached the $16,000 floor, it bounced above that level and kept stubbornly trading between $16,000 and $17,000. ![]() Toward the end of 2022, another mystifying trend caught Griffin’s eye. In 2018, they coauthored a groundbreaking study showing that a single, still unidentified, Bitcoin “whale” almost singlehandedly drove the token’s giant run-up in late 2017 and early 2018 by distorting the trading in the token. He and his coauthor Shams sifted through an incredible 200 gigabytes of trading data, equal to the troves that the Smithsonian Institution collects in two years, and followed sales and purchases from 2.5 million separate wallets. ![]() It looked like someone, or a group, was using that freshly printed “free money” to inflate Bitcoin’s price for their own profit. That clue led the pair to another: When new batches appeared, the price of Bitcoin seemed to jump. ![]() As Griffin and Amin Shams, then a doctoral candidate at McCombs who’s joined Griffin in several gumshoe investigations, screened for misdeeds in 2017, they were fascinated to see that a little-known token that’s supposed to be backed one-for-one to the dollar was getting printed in large quantities.
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