In the second half of 2022, Bitcoin prices experienced significant fluctuations due to market fluctuations. At the beginning of May, the price of Bitcoin was nearly $40000, but it experienced a sharp decline and had dropped to nearly $25000 by the end of July. For the next five months, the price of Bitcoin fluctuated between $20000 and $30000.
Although the price manipulation game in the crypto market has been played to perfection, it has always been a secret publicly disclosed by market makers. But as the trial of whether SBF is guilty continues into a crucial second week, he, who was once one of the heavyweight market participants, has already had key witnesses and testimony in manipulating the price of Bitcoin.
Caroline Ellison, the CEO of Alameda Research and former girlfriend of SBF, has always paid the price for this, providing many testimonies during this week's FTX criminal fraud trial. According to Caroline Ellison's latest testimony and conversation notes with SBF, SBF has instructed Alameda to sell BTC obtained from FTX customer funds. If Bitcoin exceeds $20000, they will continue to sell Bitcoin to stabilize its price below $20000.
Why would FTX want to carry out such operations and actions to gradually erode people's confidence in the comparison of special currency? One view is that this may be for one's own benefit, by maintaining liquidity and offsetting losses from other investments.
According to YouTube DivXMaN (@ crypto_div), FTX may have encountered liquidity issues by gambling with customer funds. Therefore, maintaining Bitcoin's low price can ensure that they can better handle withdrawal requests under liquidity pressure. In addition, low-priced Bitcoin will also suppress the prices of other assets, providing higher upside space when they try to solve problems through trading.
Cryptographic KOLTumbleBit (@ 2040yyds) also expressed its views on social media: "The common method used by market makers on trading platforms is to raise Crypto (mainly targeting several Top20 currencies such as ETH) while suppressing the exchange rate of Crypto/BTC. This is not just FTX's own approach, but also the case with other trading platforms
TumbleBit believes that there are still many players who believe that Crypto will inevitably surpass Bitcoin because they have been brainwashed for too long in the previous bull market and have become accustomed to the explosive pull trend in the currency circle. If it weren't for SBF's manipulation of funds by smashing users' BTCs, it would be impossible for currencies such as SOL, AVAX, and FTT to rise, and even ETH would not have achieved the current increase. And behind all this, it is the users themselves who pay the price for it.
As for the benefits of SBF doing so, he added, "This can slowly erode people's confidence in Bitcoin, attract all funds to Crypto, and once users' trading habits are cultivated, they can smoothly dump a large amount of junk goods to lower level players." These analyses have also been refuted by some community members, who believe that this is only due to the inherent volatility of the cryptocurrency market.
Wall Street giants may have benefited a lot from it. Since the beginning of this year, Wall Street giants such as BlackRock have applied for Bitcoin ETFs, relying on CitadelSecurities, Fidelity Investment, and Credit Suisse's cryptocurrency trading platform EDXMarkets to execute transactions. During the period when Bitcoin remained at $20000, no one knows how many chips they have accumulated.
The well-known KOLAutismCapital (@ AustrismCapital) has stated that BlackRock's choice to launch an ETF under regulatory pressure from the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) may indicate that the SEC is conducting a clean-up operation. The goal is to eliminate "low-level scammers" in the encryption field, in order to facilitate the "elite giants" of traditional American finance to rebuild a gaming platform according to their own rules.
As the largest and most respected asset management company, BlackRock may have a special relationship with the SEC, and we all know that FTX has maintained a very good and subtle relationship with the SEC, which may have many unknown secrets.
Combined with rumors of the US government's crackdown on the encryption industry, known as' Operation Suffocation 2.0 ', efforts are being made to control Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies by expelling native cryptocurrency companies and introducing large traditional companies that have formed partnerships with the US government.
Behind all this careful planning, is SBF also a part of it? This is also a thought-provoking issue, as the artificial manipulation of prices has caused concern among many investors. Many analysts and cryptocurrency observers believe that this market manipulation activity is not just the behavior of FTX or Alameda, but other trading platforms and large holders may also be involved.
However, from an optimistic perspective, although Bitcoin suffered a huge blow in the second half of 2022, its price gradually stabilized and began to slowly rise from the beginning of 2023. By April 2023, Bitcoin had already exceeded $30000, indicating that the industry was slowly recovering.
In this environment, maintaining caution and conducting sufficient research have become particularly important for ordinary investors, as well as keeping in mind the industry's most thought-provoking cryptologism: 'Yourkeys, Yourbitcoin. Notyourkeys, notyourbitcoin'. Less fantasy of becoming wealthy, as trading against top traders like SBF incurs the cost of only having their own liquidity from beginning to end.