Bitcoin Manipulation By Jane Street? Ex-Wall Street Market Maker Says No

The latest Jane Street debate on X is meeting a blunt rebuttal from Ari Paul. The BlockTower founder, who says he used to work as a Wall Street market maker 15 years ago, argues that Bitcoin’s failure to push higher is better explained by spot sell-side than by a long-running suppression campaign.

Paul’s answer was direct. “In short: no,” he wrote, before adding that market makers do “game the system” in many ways, but that in liquid products such as BTC ETFs, the effect is usually limited to “meaningful but small costs to consumers,” not a lasting distortion of the underlying asset price. He framed the distinction as one between short-term microstructure games and a broader claim that one firm kept Bitcoin from reaching far higher levels.

Bitcoin Manipulation? Small Moves, Fast Reversions

To make that case, Paul pointed to the kind of behavior traders on desks know well. “For example, market makers may manipulate the price to run stop limit orders,” he wrote. “But that’s typically on an intraday timeframe. So they might run an asset like MSFT or BTC 2% in a weak market to trigger stops, then a few seconds or minutes later, the price is mostly back to where it was before.” In his telling, that is still manipulation, but it is not the same as structurally pinning Bitcoin below some imagined fair value for months.

That argument lands against a more conspiratorial narrative now circulating online, why Bitcoin is not already at $150,000. Paul’s pushback does not deny that large Wall Street firms can shape short-term trading conditions. It rejects the stronger claim that such activity is the central explanation for Bitcoin’s broader price path.

Paul’s core point was much less dramatic. “Why is BTC down? Because OGs sold tens of thousands of coins, and not enough people wanted to buy them.” That line closely matched the view from renowned on-chain analyst James Check, who argued that “Jane Street didn’t suppress the Bitcoin price” and that “HODLers all did,” by selling large amounts of spot into the market.

He added: “My point has always been the same; manipulation is a thing that has always, will always, and is indeed the literal job of large wall street firms. However, you do not need that as the central argument to explain why the price didn’t go higher, nor why it went lower. That can be well and truly explained by looking at spot sell-side.”

Paul did leave room for exceptions. He wrote that there are rare cases where Wall Street manipulates an asset in major ways over a longer period, but said those cases are uncommon because they are risky and harder to profit from than people assume.

“There are rare exceptions where Wall Street manipulates an asset in major ways longer term, but this is quite rare because it’s very risky and not as easy as it looks to profit. 99% of the time that an asset isn’t moving like you want and people are crying “manipulation”, it’s best to embrace the cognitive dissonance, avoid the “easy way out” of blaming manipulation,” Paul wrote.

That leaves the current Jane Street argument in a narrower frame. Yes, large firms can influence intraday flows, liquidity, and execution quality. But based on Paul’s account, that is a long way from proving that one market maker is the reason Bitcoin is not trading materially higher.

Notably, the Jane Street theory picked up fresh attention after Terraform Labs’ wind-down administrator sued the firm in Manhattan federal court, alleging insider trading tied to Terra’s 2022 collapse. The complaint says Jane Street used a private chat called “Bryce’s Secret” to obtain non-public information and alleges an 85 million UST trade on Curve that helped trigger a selloff; Jane Street has denied wrongdoing and called the case opportunistic.

At press time, BTC traded at $66,090.