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A group of traders has accused the prominent American trading firm Jane Street of selling Bitcoin daily at a specific time for several consecutive months. Critics believe that the company is deliberately attempting to lower the value of the cryptocurrency asset to later acquire it at a more favorable price.
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Traders noted that the decline in Bitcoin’s price over the past months consistently began at 10:00 AM Eastern Time. A user on the social media platform X, known as Bull Theory, pointed out that Jane Street was selling Bitcoin “every morning at 10:00,” liquidating a significant number of retail investors’ positions, and then shortly thereafter repurchasing the asset.
Traders explained the company’s behavior by stating that Jane Street is an authorized participant (AP) of the BlackRock IBIT spot Bitcoin fund and therefore aims to maximize profits, including at the expense of retail players.
However, on Wednesday, February 25, the traditional sell-off at 10:00 did not occur. On that day, Bitcoin briefly surpassed the $70,000 mark, and the cryptocurrency market gained over $170 billion in capitalization. The total market value increased by approximately 8%, reaching nearly $2.5 trillion. Ethereum rose by more than 13%, while Solana increased by 15%.
According to Bark, the trading company did not conduct a sell-off that day because a lawsuit was filed by the bankruptcy trustee of the collapsed Terraform platform against Jane Street, accusing the company of insider trading.
Analyst Jeff Park claims that the “villain in the Bitcoin market” is not a single firm but the entire Bitcoin ETF architecture. Park believes that authorized participants like Jane Street operate in a regulatory gray area and, unlike other traders who must locate and verify the existence of shares before opening short positions, APs are exempt from such obligations. This allows them to use hedged Bitcoin futures instead of the actual spot asset. As a result, the connection between demand for ETFs and price increases in the spot market is disrupted—meaning that increased investments in ETFs do not automatically lead to a rise in Bitcoin’s market price, Park explained.
Previously, to redeem ETF shares, APs had to purchase Bitcoin on the open market, which supported the price. However, this requirement no longer exists, and authorized participants can acquire Bitcoin through private over-the-counter platforms with minimal market impact. Essentially, they circumvent public exchanges where the market price is established, the economist stated.
Todd Snyder, the bankruptcy trustee of the collapsed crypto platform Terraform, previously accused Jane Street of receiving non-public information from a former Terraform employee, which ultimately led to the downfall of his platform.
