There was a sudden drop in the price of Bitcoin (BTC) at noon today, and for the first time in a month, BTC saw below $ 29,000.
The minutes of the decrease in BTC price and the publication of an article about Binance in the Wall Street Journal drew attention. The Wall Street Journal is known for its frequent coverage of FUD against the cryptocurrency exchange Binance.
Considering that the WSJ's news was published at 12:30 pm, the sudden drop and the publication of the news coincide:
In the Wall Street Journal's FUD news, Binance's US arm, Binance.US, claimed that a significant portion of the stock market volume in the early days was made up of fake volumes called “wash trading”.
Wash trading is known as a practice in which a trader buys and sells the same asset to create artificial volatility in the market.
According to the WSJ's FUD claim, the SEC said that “Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao used a Swiss company called Sigma Chain to do wash trading on Binance.US, the exchange's American subsidiary, which started operations in 2019.”
However, the allegations were also responded to by Binance.
“We strongly believe that the SEC's claims regarding wash trading are completely unfounded and based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the facts and misapplication of the relevant law,” a Binance.US spokesperson said.
The spokesperson said that neither the company nor Zhao did or tolerates wash trading. He noted that the exchange has a dedicated market surveillance team that monitors activities to prevent such behavior, adding:
“Our view is that these transactions are completely legitimate interactions involving independent strategies. The relative size of trading activity does not support the claim that overall volume on the platform is affected.”
*Not investment advice.