On June 3rd, the price of Bitcoin (BTC) dropped from $8,451 to $7,886 in ninety minutes, a drop of 7%. Thanks to the intrepid Redditor u/makoveli, we know precisely why this drop took place.
As it turns out, a single individual (or perhaps a consortium trading as a unit) was responsible. This ‘whale’ moved 25,000 BTC to Coinbase. About a half hour later, they moved 14,000 of those Bitcoins to another wallet, followed forty minutes later by another transfer of 11,000 BTC from Coinbase to yet another wallet.
Then a mere fifteen minutes after that, our friendly whale moved ten million Tether (USDT) from one wallet to another.
As u/makoveli concludes, “someone dumped 25k BTC for $215M and bought it back shortly after for $200M. In doing so, they pocketed $15M and walked away with the same amount of BTC as they started with.”
Yes, this whale had $215,000,000 worth of Bitcoin to play with – and play with it they did, to the tune of $15,000,000 in profit. Not bad for 90 minutes of work.
Could anybody have moved the value of Bitcoin this way? Certainly – all you would need is 25,000 Bitcoins or so, and the will to make a huge score at the expense of all the hodler chumps out there.
And if anybody still wonders what the real purpose of Tether and other stablecoins like it is? Price manipulation like this example and many others, of course, benefitting a small handful of whales at the expense of a large number of crypto hodlers – aka marks.
Jason Bloomberg neither owns, nor plans to own, any cryptocurrency or other cryptotoken, either long or short.
1 Comments
binance
November 16, 2024 - 3:32 pmCan you be more specific about the content of your article? After reading it, I still have some doubts. Hope you can help me.