The price of bitcoin appears to be coming back from the horrors of 2022, but John Griffin – a finance professor at the University of Texas McCombs School of Business – says he’s not convinced this is happening naturally, and he wonders if BTC is somehow being manipulated.
John Griffin on Bitcoin: It’s Being Manipulated!
Bitcoin rose to prominence in late 2021. Achieving a new all-time high of $68,000 per unit in November of that year, it was thought by many that bitcoin was on top of the financial ladder permanently, and that nothing could bring it down. However, they couldn’t have been more wrong, as 2022 was a year that was easily dominated by bearish behavior.
During that time, bitcoin lost more than 70 percent of its value and fell into the mid-$16,000 range by the time the year was out. Several altcoins followed in BTC’s footsteps and ultimately lost equal or more value, thus causing the crypto space to sink by more than $2 trillion in under 12 months. It was a sad and ugly sight to witness.
Now, the months of January and February in 2023 have allegedly brought a certain degree of healing to traders as currencies like bitcoin have begun to once again move through the ranks. Not long ago, bitcoin touched $24K, meaning the asset is up nearly $8,000 from where it ended 2022, but Griffin – who discovered that bitcoin was being manipulated in 2017 and 2018 – feels the same thing is happening this time around, and he’s telling many investors to watch out.
In a recent interview, he said:
It’s very suspicious. The same mechanism we saw in 2017 could be at play now in the still unreal bitcoin market… In a period of highly negative sentiment, we’ve seen suspiciously solid floors under bitcoin.
In 2017, bitcoin had experienced its most bullish time prior to 2021. The currency rose to a new high of nearly $20K, but 2018 instantly brought the asset into the doldrums. The currency fell by more than 70 percent into the mid-$3,000 range, and many people lost their life savings on what they thought was a solid financial investment.
This Is the Same as What Was Witnessed in 2017
Griffin later published a 118-page report talking about how the stable currency Tether and the trading platform Bitfinex was being used to manipulate bitcoin and maintain a certain price level for BTC during 2017. He recently commented:
We saw far more purchases at those benchmarks. The whale kept establishing price floors, and those floors kept rising. It wasn’t a club. It was one entity, but when the whale held the price at the thresholds, that made it look as if bitcoin was safe at those floors. That made it look safe for funds and small customers to buy bitcoin, driving the price still higher.
