Every day at 10 AM sharp, the market crashes, and the mastermind behind Bitcoin getting cut in half is surprisingly Jane Street?

Bitcoin should now be at least $150,000, and everyone knows it.

But why isn’t the actual price reaching that level? A federal lawsuit filed yesterday in Manhattan provides the answer.

Let’s connect three things for the first time: a private chat group called “Bryce’s Secret” that led to a federal insider trading case; a program that consistently dumps Bitcoin at 10 a.m. until the end of 2025 to suppress its price; and an undisclosed derivatives ledger—possibly turning the world’s largest Bitcoin ETF holdings into a tool for price suppression.

All three clues point to the same name: Jane Street Capital.

Intern

It all started with an intern named Bryce Pratt.

Bryce previously interned at Terraform Labs, the Singapore-based company behind the algorithmic stablecoin UST and its token Luna. In September 2021, he left Terraform to join Jane Street as a full-time employee.

Jane Street is also where SBF learned trading, later founding FTX and Alameda Research. Many of his colleagues either came from Jane Street or have close ties to it.

According to a lawsuit filed by Terraform’s bankruptcy trustee Todd Snyder, Bryce used a chat group—referred to in court documents as “Bryce’s Secret”—to act as a bridge between his old and new employers.

The lawsuit alleges that Jane Street used this group to obtain significant non-public information about Terraform’s internal funds.

The critical moment was May 7, 2022. Terraform withdrew $150 million of UST from Curve’s 3pool—a decentralized exchange liquidity pool. Within ten minutes of this withdrawal, before any public announcement, a wallet associated with Jane Street pulled out $85 million of UST from the same pool.

What happened next is well known. The sell-off caused UST to decouple, and within days, Luna’s algorithmic mechanism completely broke down, with tokens flooding the market, a $40 billion market cap evaporating, and retail investors losing everything.

The lawsuit claims that Jane Street precisely closed its positions hours before the Terraform ecosystem collapsed, avoiding over $200 million in potential losses. Court documents plainly state: “Without insider information, these trades would have been impossible.”

Jane Street responded that the lawsuit was “ridiculous” and “baseless,” claiming that the losses of Terra and Luna holders were caused by Terraform’s own fraud.

By the way, Do Kwon is now serving a 15-year sentence. Snyder also sued Jump Trading for $4 billion, indicating a systematic investigation into institutional behavior during Terra’s collapse—not just targeting Jane Street.

The Clock Starts Turning

From late 2024 into 2025, Bitcoin’s price exhibited a baffling pattern for traders:

Every day at 10 a.m. Eastern Time, right when the U.S. stock market opens, Bitcoin would face a sharp dump. This decline was highly precise, clearly programmatic, and wildly disproportionate, unrelated to overall market trends. It specifically targeted leveraged longs, triggering chain liquidations, then prices would rebound within hours.

Blockchain analytics firm Glassnode’s founders tracked this pattern over several months. Their data showed how obvious it was. In December last year, Bitcoin’s price dropped from $89,700 to $87,700 within minutes after opening at 10 a.m., wiping out $171 million of long positions, then slowly rebounded.

This happened every single day.

As a designated market maker and authorized participant for multiple Bitcoin ETFs, Jane Street holds spot Bitcoin and has the infrastructure to sell large amounts. During periods of low liquidity, opening a dump can push prices down, trigger leveraged liquidations, and then buy back at lower prices. This seamless operation involves creating a decline first, then bottoming out and buying the dip.

Then something interesting happened.

Glassnode’s founders said that after the lawsuit documents against Terraform were made public early last year, these daily flash crashes stopped. Bitcoin’s price stabilized noticeably. It was no coincidence—obvious that the firm suddenly realized regulators might come knocking.

But this stability didn’t last long. By Q3 2025, the 10 a.m. dumps resumed, and by year’s end, the pattern was fully back.

In short: when lawyers are watching, Jane Street doesn’t dump; once the scrutiny subsides, it resumes.

Quantitative Machines

In Q4 2025, Jane Street disclosed in its 13F filings that it held over 20.3 million shares of IBIT (BlackRock’s Bitcoin ETF), worth about $790 million. In that quarter alone, it increased holdings by 7.1 million shares, valued at $276 million. At one point last year, its total IBIT holdings approached $2.5 billion.

Meanwhile, it aggressively bought MicroStrategy stock, increasing holdings by 473% to over 950,000 shares, worth about $121 million. During the same period, BlackRock and Vanguard sold off billions worth of MicroStrategy shares.

Many crypto media outlets saw this 13F and exclaimed, “Wow, institutions are buying in!” But seasoned market observers knew better.

Does this look like a bullish bet on Bitcoin? Not necessarily. That’s not what Jane Street does.

Jane Street is one of only four firms authorized to perform “creation and redemption” of IBIT—others include Virtu Americas, J.P. Morgan, and Marex. It is also an authorized participant for Fidelity and WisdomTree Bitcoin ETFs. What does that mean? It means it can directly access the pipeline linking ETF prices to real Bitcoin. It can move real Bitcoin in and out of ETFs, arbitrage between fund and spot prices, and accumulate holdings that ordinary investors can’t.

In other words, Jane Street controls the “water pipe” connecting Bitcoin ETFs and actual Bitcoin—others do not.

Invisible Ledger

Former hedge fund manager Michael Green said that interpreting Jane Street’s 13F as a bullish signal makes him “uncomfortable.” He pointed out that Jane Street’s IBIT holdings are “almost certainly offset by undisclosed options and futures positions,” and “they’re definitely not building long Bitcoin positions; this is standard market-making activity.”

Former prop trader Ryan Scott was more direct: “Anyone who takes this as a positive is a ‘death row inmate’ of finance. It should be understood as: ‘Who else is holding undisclosed hedging derivatives?’”

Nicolas Baty summarized: Jane Street holds IBIT mainly to sell options, arbitrage, and perform rapid quantitative trades.

What does this mean for anyone holding Bitcoin or IBIT?

13F only discloses long stock positions, not options, futures, or swaps. So when Jane Street reports holding $790 million in IBIT stock, you have no idea whether those stocks are hedged with puts, offset with short futures, or packaged into complex options strategies—possibly with zero or even negative actual Bitcoin exposure (i.e., short).

The public only sees buying activity. But its real positions could be huge shorts—because the hedged portion, under current disclosure rules, remains invisible.

13F is like a half-photo—only half of Jane Street’s position is visible; the other half is hidden.

So every Bitcoin holder must ask an unavoidable question: if Jane Street holds $790 million in IBIT and hedges with $790 million in puts or short futures, the net position is zero. If its derivatives positions are larger than its stock holdings, the net could be negative—that is, it profits when Bitcoin falls.

In that case, it has every incentive to use its privileged status as an authorized participant to dump spot prices, trigger liquidations, and profit from the spread.

The question is: does Jane Street see Bitcoin as bullish or bearish? Under current disclosure rules, it doesn’t have to say.

Precedent

Jane Street’s behavior in Bitcoin markets hasn’t been scrutinized by regulators yet, but it has been in other markets.

In 2025, the Indian Securities and Exchange Board issued a 105-page penalty order accusing Jane Street of manipulating the BANKNIFTY index options market.

The SEBI found that Jane Street profited 36.5 billion rupees (about $430 million) over two years through coordinated trading in spot and derivatives markets, earning 73.5 billion rupees (about $88 million) in a single day. The regulator explicitly stated such behavior is illegal in any well-regulated financial jurisdiction. It then restricted Jane Street’s trading activities.

Look at its pattern in Indian index derivatives: leveraging speed and scale, it first manipulates one market, then harvests profits in the derivatives layer above.

The question now: is the Bitcoin market similarly manipulated?

21 Million

The 21 million cap is maintained collectively by a global network of Bitcoin nodes.

But this cap only works if price discovery is honest—that the market reflects real supply and demand. Institutions holding Bitcoin or related products do so because they genuinely believe in it, not because they’re using it as raw material for unseen derivative strategies.

In other words, the 21 million only makes sense if the market is honest.

And now?

Jane Street is one of only four firms with the infrastructure keys to Bitcoin ETFs. It is currently under federal indictment, accused of front-running on insider info, contributing to a $40 billion market cap loss. It is alleged to have used programmatic dumping to suppress Bitcoin’s price for months. It holds the largest public ETF position and maintains an undisclosed derivatives ledger—one that could make it appear bullish while actually being bearish.

Therefore, the 21 million cap, in front of Jane Street, is just a number. It can create “synthetic” Bitcoin infinitely through undisclosed derivatives on top of its ETF holdings.

While Bitcoin is inherently scarce at the protocol level, the price discovery mechanism above has been compromised by a company treating privilege as a cash machine. Current disclosure rules enable it to continue this game unnoticed.

Every Bitcoin holder should ask themselves: what are Jane Street’s true positions—long or short?

Before knowing that, the market price of Bitcoin isn’t determined by supply and demand—it’s controlled by Jane Street.