Source: Justin Bechler, Crypto Analyst; Compiled by: Jinse Finance
Bitcoin should be worth at least $150,000 right now, that's common knowledge.
Yesterday, a federal lawsuit was filed in Manhattan detailing why this isn't the case.
Let's connect three threads for the first time: a federal insider trading case based on a private chat group called "Bryce's Secret"; a systematic 10 AM sell-off planned to suppress Bitcoin's price until the end of 2025; and an unpublished derivatives ledger that could have made the largest Bitcoin ETF holdings in history a tool for suppressing Bitcoin's price.
These three clues all ultimately point to the same name: Jane Street Capital. The story's protagonist is an intern named Bryce Pratt. Pratt previously interned at Terraform Labs, a Singapore-based company that developed the algorithmic stablecoin TerraUSD and its token Luna. He left Terraform in September 2021 to join Jane Street as a full-time employee. Jane Street was also where SBF learned trading before founding FTX and Alameda Research; many of his future colleagues came from or had connections to the company's network. According to a lawsuit filed by Terraform's bankruptcy administrator, Todd Snyder, Pratt acted as a bridge between his former and new employers through a chat group called "Bryce's Secret." The lawsuit alleges that Jane Street used this channel to obtain material, non-public information regarding internal liquidity changes at Terraform. A pivotal moment occurred on May 7, 2022. Terraform withdrew $150 million worth of TerraUSD from Curve3pool, a decentralized exchange and the stablecoin's primary liquidity hub. Less than ten minutes before Terraform publicly notified or released any announcement, a wallet associated with Jane Street withdrew $85 million worth of TerraUSD from the same pool.
@BullTheoryio: According to a new lawsuit, Jane Street is behind the $40 billion collapse of Luna UST.
A lawsuit filed in a U.S. District Court alleges that Jane Street profited from insider information during the Terra crash in May 2022 and further damaged the system.
Selling pressures combined to cause UST to decouple from the dollar peg. Within days, Luna's algorithmic issuance and burning mechanism went out of control, causing a dramatic increase in the token supply and wiping out $40 billion in market capitalization. Retail investors suffered catastrophic losses.
A lawsuit filed in a U.S. District Court alleges that Jane Street profited from insider information during the Terra crash in May 2022 and further damaged the system.
According to the lawsuit, Jane Street averted over $200 million in potential losses by closing positions "just hours before the Terraform ecosystem collapsed." The lawsuit describes some trades as "impossible to have been completed without Jane Street's exclusive insider information." Jane Street calls the lawsuit "desperate" and "baseless," arguing that the losses suffered by Terra and Luna holders were caused by Terraform's own fraudulent activities. Do Kwon is currently serving a 15-year sentence. Snyder has also filed a separate $4 billion lawsuit against Jump Trading regarding alleged manipulation of the Terra collapse. This indicates that the investigation aims to systematically examine the actions of institutions during the Terra collapse, rather than simply presenting isolated allegations against a single company.
@zerohedge: The truth is out. Jane Street was the mastermind behind the 2022 cryptocurrency winter. First, it decoupled UST, destroying Terraform. Then, it pretended to save Terra, but actually sucked away the remaining meager value.
Starting from the end of 2024 and accelerating in 2025, Bitcoin's price began to exhibit phenomena that some traders noticed but could not explain.
Every trading day at 10:00 AM (Eastern Time), coinciding with the opening of the US stock market, Bitcoin experiences sudden and sharp sell-offs. These drops are precise, algorithmically controlled, and highly disproportionate to overall market conditions. They wipe out leveraged long positions, triggering a chain of liquidations, before rebounding within hours. Jan Happel and Yann Allemann, co-founders of blockchain analytics firm Glassnode, documented these patterns through their joint account, Negentropic. They tracked the algorithmic precision of price drops across months of trading data and found the pattern remarkably pronounced. A chart from December shows Bitcoin plummeting from $89,700 to $87,700 within minutes of the 10:00 AM opening, resulting in a $171 million loss for long positions before recovering. This happens daily, in a series of events.
Basically, the 10 AM sell-off stopped immediately after Jane Street was sued, and resumed after the storm had died down. Jane Street's Operating Mechanism Jane Street disclosed in its Q4 2025 13F filing that it held 20,315,780 shares of IBIT, worth approximately $790 million. The company added 7,105,206 shares in that quarter alone, increasing its value by $276 million. Last year, its total IBIT holdings were worth nearly $2.5 billion. Meanwhile, the company increased its MicroStrategy holdings by 473%, bringing its total to 951,187 shares, worth approximately $121 million, while BlackRock and Vanguard sold billions of dollars worth of MSTR stock during the same period.@WhaleFactor: Since the beginning of November, Bitcoin has been falling by about 2-3% almost every trading day within minutes of the US stock market opening (around 10 AM ET). Many traders believe that Jane Street's massive position of over $2.5 billion in BlackRock's IBIT may be the direct cause of this phenomenon: they are accumulating funds by artificially manipulating liquidity. As a designated market maker and authorized participant for multiple Bitcoin ETFs, Jane Street possesses ample inventory and infrastructure to execute coordinated sell-offs on a large scale within predictable liquidity windows. At the open, if the order book is thin, the sell-off depresses prices, triggering a chain reaction of sell-offs by leveraged traders, thus creating buying opportunities at lower prices. The company can then re-enter at the bottom of its artificially created price pattern. Then, something shocking happened. According to the co-founder of Glassnode, the daily flash crashes stopped after Terraform Labs' lawsuit was published. Bitcoin prices stabilized significantly in subsequent trading days. This shift in behavior is consistent with a company suddenly facing legal investigations and witness testimony.
@BSCNews: Breaking news, Bitcoin price surges above $65,000, allegedly halting the "10 AM manipulation" incident. Bitcoin (BTC) rose 3.5% to break $65,000 hours after a lawsuit was filed against Jane Street, a major authorized participant in BlackRock and Fidelity Bitcoin ETFs.
The 10 AM sell-off pattern resumed in Q3 2025. By December, the pattern had fully recovered.
@BTCtreasuries: Breaking news: Jane Street just disclosed that they have purchased another 785,224 shares of Bitcoin treasury company Strategy ($MSTR), bringing their total holdings to 951,187 shares (worth $121 million). That's a 473% increase. They know what's coming next.
If you don't understand Jane Street's operating model, this looks like a bullish accumulation pattern.
If you don't know Jane Street's operating model, this looks like bullish accumulation.
If you don't know Jane Street's operating model, this looks like bullish accumulation.
Jane Street is one of only four firms authorized to conduct in-kind subscriptions and redemptions for IBIT. The other three are Virtu Americas, JPMorgan Securities, and Marex. Jane Street is also an authorized participant in Fidelity and WisdomTree Bitcoin ETFs. This status gives the firm direct access to the mechanism that links ETF share prices to actual Bitcoin. Jane Street can move real Bitcoin in and out of the ETF structure, arbitrage the price difference between the fund and the spot market, and maintain inventory positions far exceeding what any ordinary market participant can accumulate. Essentially, Jane Street has direct access to the pipeline connecting Bitcoin ETFs and actual Bitcoin, something virtually no one else can do. Cryptocurrency media interprets the 13F filing as a manifestation of institutional confidence. But those who truly understand market structure immediately offer a different perspective. The Invisible Ledger Former hedge fund manager Michael Green called the bullish interpretation of Jane Street's 13F filing "heartbreaking." He pointed out that Jane Street's IBIT positions were "almost entirely offset by undisclosed options and futures positions," and that "they were definitely not 'accumulating' Bitcoin positions. That's how market making works." Former proprietary trader Ryan Scott put it more bluntly: "Anyone who interprets this as bullish rhetoric is committing a serious crime. It should be changed to 'You'd never guess who else holds undisclosed hedging derivatives positions.'" Nik Bhatia simplified it to an incentive mechanism: "Jane Street holds IBIT so it can do options trading, arbitrage trading, and all the other things quantitative trading firms do to make quick money." What does this mean for everyone holding Bitcoin or IBIT?
13F filings disclose long equity positions, not options, futures, or swap transactions. For example, Jane Street reported holding $790 million worth of IBIT stock, but the filing didn't specify whether these shares were hedged with put options, offset with short futures, or whether collar options were used, thus making the company's net Bitcoin exposure zero or even negative.
What the public sees is just the establishment of positions. The actual holdings could be huge short positions, but because the hedging portion is not visible under current disclosure rules, it appears as a long position.
The 13F form is one side of the balance sheet. The other side is invisible to those outside the company.
This leads to the question every Bitcoin holder should ask.
If a company holds $790 million worth of IBIT stock and hedges that position with $790 million worth of put options or short futures, its net risk exposure is zero. If the derivatives trading volume exceeds the stock position, the net risk exposure is negative, meaning Jane Street could profit when the price of Bitcoin falls. In either case, Jane Street has a strong incentive to use its special status as an authorized participant to depress the spot price, trigger liquidations, and profit from the price difference. What is Jane Street's actual net exposure to Bitcoin? Current disclosure frameworks do not require them to answer this question. Precedent Jane Street's behavior in the Bitcoin market has not yet been examined by regulators, but its behavior in other markets has. In 2025, the Securities and Exchange Commission of India (SEBI) issued a 105-page enforcement order accusing Jane Street of manipulating BANKNIFTY index options. [Image link: https://img.jinse.com.cn/7435690_watermarknone.png](https://img.jinse.com.cn/https://img.jinse.com.cn/7435690_watermarknone.png) [Image link: https://x.com/vishalmehta29](https://x.com/vishalmehta29) [Blockquote](https://vishalmehta29): The Securities and Exchange Commission of India (SEBI) has dropped a bombshell on Jane Street with a 105-page order accusing it of manipulating the BANKNIFTY index! Single-day profit of 73.5 billion rupees (January 17, 2024)Strategy: 1. Background and Triggering Factors – Triggering Event: In April 2024, media reported that Jane Street Group filed a lawsuit accusing it of stealing its assets.
The Securities and Exchange Commission of India (SEBI) found that the company had earned 365.02 billion rupees (approximately US$4.3 billion) in profits over two years by using coordinated trading in the cash and derivatives markets, including 7.35 billion rupees in single-day trading.
The regulator stated that such behavior is clearly illegal in any country with an effective financial regulator and issued a temporary restriction on the company's trading. Jane Street's strategy in the Indian index derivatives market follows a common structure: **using its speed and scale advantage to manipulate a single market and then profit in the derivatives market above it.** The question is whether the same logic applies to Bitcoin. The 21 million BTC cap is enforced by the Bitcoin sovereign node network. This cap assumes that price discovery is honest, the market reflects actual supply and demand, and that when institutions hold Bitcoin or Bitcoin-related instruments, their positions represent genuine exposure to the asset, not raw materials for derivative strategies that are invisible to all other participants. In other words, the 21 million cap only works if the market above it is honest. Jane Street is one of four companies that possess key information about the Bitcoin ETF infrastructure. The company faces a federal lawsuit accusing it of using insider trading to front-run, resulting in the loss of $40 billion. It is also accused of running an algorithmic sell-off program that suppressed Bitcoin prices for months. Furthermore, the company holds the largest disclosed Bitcoin ETF position, while its derivatives portfolio may make its actual exposure completely different from what is shown in the filings. Therefore, when Jane Street can create an unlimited synthetic supply by layering undisclosed derivatives on top of its own ETF inventory, the cap becomes irrelevant. Bitcoin's scarcity is real at the protocol level, but its price discovery mechanism has been undermined by a company that uses privileged access as a profit-making tool, and the current disclosure framework allows them to do so without oversight. Every Bitcoin holder has the right to know: What is Jane Street's actual net position? Until the truth comes out, Jane Street determines the price of Bitcoin.
Why have both Terraform and India sued Jane Street? Did Jane Street orchestrate the 10 AM crash? What is Jane Street's profit-making logic? Did Jane Street trigger the bear market?
JinseFinanceCompanies that were supposed to be "market makers" and "providing liquidity" were accused of front-running, manipulating national stock indices, and running daily algorithmic sell-off programs to trade assets tracked by their ETFs.
JinseFinanceAs the market's attention began to turn to Jane Street itself, it itself became a mystery.
JinseFinanceIn short: No single AP is explicitly suppressing the price of Bitcoin. What the AP structure can suppress is the integrity of the price discovery mechanism itself.
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