Tether Strike Back at Bitcoin’s 2017 Manipulation

• Tether issue official response to BTC manipulation research paper
• Professors at the University of Texas, and an assistant professor at the Ohio State University, John Griffin and Amin Shams, respectively conducted the research into the manipulation on 2017
• Tether claims the paper is bias

Last night, Tether published an official response to a research paper which discussed the claim that one market whale on Bitfinex was behind the price of bitcoin surging up to $20k in 2017.

On November 4th this week, Bloomberg released a study that claimed that the unexpected surge in price that bitcoin went through in 2017 was caused pure and simple, by market manipulation.

Research 

Professors at the University of Texas, and an assistant professor at the Ohio State University, John Griffin and Amin Shams, respectively conducted the research into the manipulation on 2017. They concluded that the buying pressure behind bitcoin on Bitfinex increased as soon as its price crashed the following year, to a certain extent.

“Our results suggest instead of thousands of investors moving the price of bitcoin, it’s just one large one. Years from now, people will be surprised to learn that investors handed over billions to people they didn’t know and who faced little oversight.”

The Tether Strikes Back

Tether has today issued an official statement declaring that the peer-reviewed paper was just a “watered-down” debacle and an “embarrassing walk-back” of the previous article. The company further said that the study had some “methodological defects.” On top of this, it made it known that the bias point of view of the authors who believed that the price of bitcoin could be manipulated by a single entity.

“The purported conclusions reached by the authors are built on a house of cards that suffers from the absence of a complete dataset. As an example of one of many deficiencies, the authors openly admit they do not have accurate data on the crucial timing of transactions or the flow of capital across different exchanges.”

It will be interesting to see how this situation plays out. For more news on this and other crypto updates, keep it with CryptoDaily!