Market manipulation is getting out of hand again and again the most bullish news turns into the most devastating dump billions are liquidated and the market hangs by a thread but just when it looks like we’re headed to Goblin Town the cycle miraculously uncook itself but is the market really manipulated or are we just blaming others for our poor altcoin choices is crypto one big scop or are we just paranoid it’s time we got to the bottom of this my name is Guy let’s get some answers right let’s cut to the chase is the crypto Market manipulated well the short answer is yes and the long answer is hell yes asking is the market manipulated is a bit like asking does crime exist Fair markets are nothing more than a platonic ideal like the version of the hamburger you see on TV if you literally believe that’s what you’re buying into you’re in for a nasty shock all Financial markets are prone to manipulation as long as some participants have an opportunity to profit from an unfair Advantage manipulation will continue and manipulation is Rife in markets far more mature and tightly regulated than crypto like for instance equities and FX The perpetrators include the biggest banks in the world don’t believe me let’s take foreign exchange as an example then here’s a story Associated Press ran a few years ago quote EU finds Banks over $1 billion over foreign exchange cartel yep EU Regulators finded Barkley’s JP Morgan City group mufg and the Royal Bank of Scotland for colluding in the trade of large sums of foreign currency UBS was a sixth co-conspirator but they got off the hook for snitching which is the only reason we know about this case investigators found that Bank employees in charge of spot trading of the Euro US Canadian New Zealand and Australian dollars the Japanese Yen British pound Swiss frank and danish Swedish and Norwegian Crona exchanged plans and sensitive information about current and future orders prices and trading activities between 2007 and 2013 so we’ve got the world’s biggest banks in group chats looking at the Forex markets with x-ray SP and swapping details of their clients buys sells stops targets and so on as the EU commission put it this enabled them to quote make informed Market decisions on whether to sell or buy the currencies they had in their portfolios and when now cases like this give us a glimpse behind the curtain but there’s much disagreement about how deep the rot really goes is Market manipulation episodic or systematic is it a few bad apples or is the whole damn apple tree a criminal Enterprise it’s not easy to prove outright one way or the other still Barkley’s JP Morgan mufg City UBS and RBS running a criminal cartel for six years before anyone snitched well I for one wouldn’t call that a few bad apples anyway if organized crime at this level can persist undisturbed for years in the highly regulated Forex Market why would crypto be any cleaner crypto is barely 15 years old and very poorly regulated in the US where most of the action happens there’s still no comprehensive regulatory framework designed for crypto as we all know the previous administration left regulation up to the SEC with disastrous results the agency’s hamfisted approach hurt businesses and did nothing to protect the investing public from crypto Market manipulation with the ch of administration this year us crypto regulation is once again extremely hands-off now we may see reasonable regulations for crypto passed in Congress over the next four years but until then the barely tongue-in-cheek consensus is that crime is legal heavy-handed poor regulation has simply been replaced with light-handed poor regulation all of this suggests that market manipulators can still enjoy total impunity in crypto I mean it speaks volumes that the most feared investigator and prosecutor that crypto has ever seen is still a penguin called Zack xbt anyway so we have the conditions for Market manipulation to thrive now let’s take a look at what crypto Market manipulation actually entails if you’ve seen our previous videos on this topic you’ll know that manipulation includes pump and dump schemes rigged token listings faked volume rug pools insider trading and well basically everything in between and you don’t have to look far to find crypt native Market manipulation on chain let’s look at decentralized exchange markets now we know that cheap and fast blockchains like salana have made it possible for just about anyone to issue their own crypto that can be traded on decentralized exchanges nothing wrong with that however it’s also very easy to turn this into a market manipulation scheme for example once your token is tradable on dexes you can automate wash trading now if you’re not familiar wash trading means insiders trading with each other to generate the illusion of trading volume the idea is to trick other Market participants into thinking that your crypto has some kind of organic momentum behind it now wash trading itself is nothing new but on decentralized exchanges you don’t even need another person to wash trade with you can generate as many wallets as you want and split the token Supply and some amount of funding between them you then run an automated buying and selling program to have them trade your crypto back and forth all day like a computer playing a game of pong against itself add some botted social media activity and voila you have not only a crypto token but a crypto project nay a movement revolutionizing the future of decentralized AI something something liquidity real world something oh that’ll do and if you’re lucky the Market might bite as buys from real humans trickle in you can watch their crypto acrew in your liquidity pool and if you pay off the right influencers this might even last for a whole day or more but when momentum stalls that’s your Quee to exit you turn the dial on your automated trading program from buy and sell to sell sell sell once your wallets have exhausted their share of the token Supply you can then withdraw whatever is left in the liquidity pool ping the chart and completing the rug pole this kudrass is executed at the blockchain level using smart contracts and that’s why it’s a kind of Market manipulation unique to crypto and this example is just one of the novel forms of manipulation found on dex’s Smart contracts also make it possible to for example tax buys and sells or block anyone but yourself from selling the token now if you’re a regular Dex user you’ll be as accustomed to this kind of manipul ulation as you are to the hum of your refrigerator and by the way if this doesn’t sound like your cup of tea then you may prefer to stick to centralized exchanges and if you’re not sure which one is best for you you can check out the coin Bureau deals page linked to in the description to access exclusive signup bonuses and trading fee discounts on the very top Sexes now anyway until recently Dex manipulation was the Bottom Rung of the crypto market and had little influence on the market as a whole whole however as the mecoin market exploded in 2024 all this changed vast sums of money are now involved notably salana has been settling up to$ 36 billion doar worth of transactions per day as a result we now have tier one centralized exchanges scrambling to list bottom of the barrel memes like their bottom line depends on it this has eroded the distinction between Dex Market manipulation and whatever is happening happening in the broader crypto Market in the first 2 months of 2025 alone individual meme coins made headlines around the world and shook the entire crypto Market on more than one occasion of course I’m talking about Trump and Libra two meme coins that became macros shck events for the crypto Market they were two very different launches but both brought onchain Market manipulation center stage in crypto now Donald Trump launching his own mcoin 2 days before for being sworn in as president is a questionable practice to begin with no doubt many voters bought into the hype he created on social media only to lose most of their investment very quickly after the chart looks like a controlled Demolition and represents a massive transfer of wealth from retail to Wales a significant portion of this was claimed by a single sniper who paid an $84,000 bribe and spent $1.6 million to buy up the supply of trump with the very first transaction upon launch everyone who bought after seeing Trump’s tweet was then fleeced as the sniper dumped the supply on them and walked away with $18 million in profit now the sniper apparently had no connection to the Token but discovered its contract address Exposed on chain prior to the launch if this is true then they were acting on publicly available information and did nothing illegal of course this will be of little consolation to the countless buyers upon whom they dumped however our other example is pure unadulterated crime allegedly many layers of Market manipulation were exposed by the Libra debacle there was the Argentine president accepting bribes via his sister to promote a mem coin on social media allegedly there was his misrepresentation of the token as an investment in Argentina’s economy there was the Project’s team who sniped their own launch and then rugged the token 50 minutes later to the tune of $100 million and then there was the Fallout it turned out that the same team was responsible for the Melania rug that Melania Trump had promoted on social media it also turned out that members of this team had been present at the exclusive crypto ball event in Washington DC on the eve of Trump’s inauguration the team’s CEO described matter of factly how all noteworthy mcoin launches are rigged in the same way and how it’s futile for anyone but insiders to try and make money in such conditions then audio surfac of the co-founder of one of sana’s biggest dexes having a nervous breakdown as a fellow defi founder suggested that they were guilty of orchestrating a massive insider trading scheme a crime of proportions similar to the FTX Scandal allegedly the the whole crypto Market tanked as the gruesome reality and extent of Market manipulation in the mcoin economy was revealed by both self-confessed and alleged perpetrators gone are the days when what happens on chain stays on chain Trump Melania and Libra showed us the tail wagging the dog as criminally manipulated or otherwise deeply unfair shitcoin launches shied by world leaders shook the entire crypto market now this is is all deeply scandalous but at the same time season degens will not have been shocked to learn that the mcoin market is manipulated the involvement of world leaders is crazy but decentralized exchanges have always been the wild west of crypto moreover as big and parasitic as these macro meme shocks have become they’re still episodic in nature most market-wide crashes are not in fact caused by memes but depending on who you ask many most or even all market-wide dumps and pumps are the result of manipulation yes Market wide I’m talking BTC usdt eth Soul xrp you name it but is that even possible and if so what’s the true extent of market-wide manipulation these are some of the biggest and most controversial questions we face in the crypto Market we can all agree that whales and Insiders can manipulate the prices of smaller cap cryptos mem coins or not this is because they are very IL liquid meaning that it doesn’t take a lot of buying or selling pressure to significantly move the price when you have the power to move prices at will you can induce hope Euphoria Terror confusion and despair in Market participants on mass and when you can control their emotions profiting is like taking candy from a baby but what about major cryptos BTC eth Soul xrp BNB they account for well over $2 trillion doar in market cap which is most of the total crypto Market how can they be manipulated like small cap cryptos to suggest that they are subject to deliberate and chronic price manipulation is to open a pretty big can of worms it invites a whole range of sinister possibilities from the crypto Market being Rife with conspiracy to the whole thing being one massive scop what if behind every candle there’s a whale setting a trap for retail and could crypto be one big mechanism for Upward wealth redistribution these are controversial ideas and how you feel about them may depend on your politics in particular it’s worth asking what the word conspiracy means to you if it makes you think of something obviously false outlandish and not worthy of serious consideration well you’ll probably be disinclined to believe any of this stuff if that’s you then the idea that a cabal of Institutions is forcing the price of Bitcoin up and down in order to liquidate the last $200 in your trading account is just silly sure there is plenty of crime going around but markets fundamentally operate on supply and demand crypto price action can be explained by nothing more Sinister than that it’s even more absurd when paranoid Deens try to explain who is doing all the manipulating the starter pack is every exchange and Market maker but then there’s also the likes of Larry thinkink Donald Trump the folks at Ripple and countless other Big Wigs allegedly pumping and dumping the market from behind the curtain then there’s the suggestion that the world’s newsrooms coordinate the release of bullish and bearish news to coincide with macro tops and bottoms the theory goes that there are no coincidences everything is premeditated and even written in the charts in advance now to some this is is asking simply too much of the imagination however for others conspiracy is the normal continuation of normal business by normal means if this sounds about right to you then it shouldn’t be hard to imagine that manipulation is the default mode of the market and no aberration if you follow enough seasoned Traders you’ll encounter this idea again and again there are entire schools of thought based on this very premise specifically smart money Concepts SMC posits the market as an operation by Banks investment funds Venture capitalists exchanges institutional investors and a very small number of elite traders to hunt dumb money aka the rest of us every time we take a position in the crypto Market we are trading against smart money they know exactly how we operate but most of us don’t know how they operate they know that we make emotional decisions and cling to expectations based on fundamental analysis bullish and bearish catalysts meanwhile they use algorithmic trading to manipulate the market targeting key price points on high time frames where orders are most concentrated the goal is to grab as much of this liquidity as possible the more orders the more liquidity and the more liquidity the more potential profit this is why you’ll hear about smart money hunting stop losses and aiming to liquidate as many Traders as possible this is not difficult for them to do because they whales working with enormous position sizes big enough to pump and dump the prices of even the biggest cryptos this is possible because liquidity is typically concentrated at the top of the order book once the buy or sell wall at the top of the order book is broken few people want to step in as a liquidity provider of Last Resort if a whale initiates a pump or dump with a huge buy or sell order there’s little friction preventing price from extending the move to the next Keys Supply or demand Zone on the chart in other words price manipulation requires little more than cracking support or resistance it’s nothing too mysterious or hard to understand and it applies to majors and small caps alike all this implies that smart money can simply paint whatever chart they like giving them enormous power over dumb money however Skeptics will be more reluctant to see a big picture behind all of this sure the biggest whales can push the price of major cryptos in One Direction or the other but the notion that basically every major move in the market and even the release of news is engineered in this way is a hard pill to swallow and though it may be true on shorter time frames it probably isn’t on longer time frames where actual fundamentals do matter now we can all agree that the price action in the crypto Market over the last two months has been diabolical again and again we’ve seen euphoric bullish news transform into devastating Market collapse prices pump just enough to get us thinking we’re so back and opening leverage Longs only to give way to a crushing retracement once the last de gen is liquidated and all hope is lost the market reverses causing another wave of fomo and emotional decision-making this lays a fresh trap and so the cycle continues milking retail participants for every last drop now it may never be possible to mask specific people and entities pulling levers to liquidate us and we may never be able to assign malicious intent once and for all but unless we’re trying to file a class action lawsuit I dare say the truth is actually irrelevant whether or not it is deliberately engineered in this way the market is constantly manipulating us it moves as though it’s trying to ruin as many players as possible this may be the result of supply and demand or it may be a criminal conspiracy but either way the outcome is the same for us like other financial markets the goal in crypto is to stay alive for as long as possible to do so it’s helpful to assume that the market is permanently out to get you even if you don’t literally believe this to be true risk management skepticism and caution are indispensable they may not sound like a recipe for 100x in your portfolio overnight but that’s okay because this is a marathon and not a Sprint short-term manipulation is only a problem if you have a short-term time Horizon in the longer term it’s clear Which Way crypto is headed and we’d be wise to adjust our Horizons accordingly and now folks I’d like to hear from you let us know just how manipulated the crypto Market is in the comments down below if you got something out of this video manipulate that like liquidate the Subscribe button and ping your notification Bell so you don’t miss our next upload as always thank you for watching and I’ll see you next time this is guy over and out
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