manipulation

As Robinhood accelerates its layout in the prediction market, it has proactively excluded certain contract products due to concerns that they may foster market manipulation and insider trading risks. Robinhood UK President Jordan Sinclair stated that the company is highly attentive to market abuse issues and will not offer all prediction markets or event contracts to users, but will selectively launch products that are more suitable for customers.Recently, several "precise betting" incidents have raised regulatory concerns. For example, there were unusually large bets placed on Polymarket before U.S. actions against Iran; Israeli regulators have also sued two individuals who used confidential information to place bets. Additionally, "mention markets" (such as words that will appear in a speech being bet on) have been explicitly excluded from Robinhood's product range due to their susceptibility to manipulation.Currently, Robinhood primarily provides compliant prediction market services through partnerships with Kalshi and ForecastEx, prioritizing regulated platforms to reduce information abuse and cross-border compliance risks. In contrast, the less regulated Polymarket allows users to trade through cryptocurrency wallets with relatively loose identity verification.Robinhood previously anticipated that prediction markets would become an important growth engine, with CEO Vlad Tenev stating that this business could become one of the fastest-growing segments by 2025, potentially driving the formation of a trillion-dollar annual trading scale in the future.

According to Cointelegraph, U.S. prosecutors have filed lawsuits against 10 foreign nationals associated with four cryptocurrency market makers. Three executives have been extradited from Singapore to the U.S. and appeared in federal court in Oakland, California, this Monday.The three defendants appearing in court are Gleb Gora, CEO of Vortex; Manu Singh, CEO of Contrarian; and Vasu Sharma, an employee of Contrarian. They were extradited to the U.S. after being arrested in Singapore in October 2025.The companies involved include Gotbit, Vortex, Antier, and Contrarian, with related activities dating back to 2018. The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) accuses these companies of creating false trading volumes through wash trading, matched orders, and prearranged trading, artificially inflating token prices, creating a false sense of liquidity, and attracting retail investors before insiders sold their holdings.

According to monitoring by BlockSec, a suspicious transaction targeting an unknown contract (Stake) on the BSC chain was discovered, resulting in a loss of approximately $133,000.The attacker exploited a vulnerability in the spot price dependency of the Stake contract, manipulated the TUR price in the TUR-NOBEL pool, and then staked TUR. Based on the inflated price, they triggered reward calculations and claimed the amplified rewards through a referral account, ultimately exchanging the stolen TUR for USDT to profit.

According to Binance's official blog, Binance has released a red flag guide for cryptocurrency market makers, warning users and project parties to be cautious of the following risky behaviors: aggressive sell-offs that conflict with token release plans, one-sided sell orders, cross-platform coordinated sell-offs, high trading volumes that do not match price trends, and abnormal price fluctuations caused by insufficient liquidity.Binance recommends that project parties conduct strict due diligence when selecting market makers, clarify contract terms, prohibit profit-sharing models, and continuously monitor market maker activities after listing. Binance stated that it will take punitive measures such as blacklisting against non-compliant market makers and will open reporting channels.

Pump.fun co-founder alon disclosed on platform X that the platform has updated its fee mechanism to address malicious manipulation issues in token issuance. Previously, each token issued on pump.fun had an associated Coin Admin who could arbitrarily change the fee recipient and distribution method, leading to manipulative behavior: creators would first set fees directed to others, and once the token gained popularity, they would redirect the fees back to their own wallets, harming user interests.After the update, all tokens will default to the regular creator fee (except for rebate tokens), and creators will have only one opportunity to redirect the fees to another wallet; thereafter, the fee settings will be locked. If creators do not use this opportunity, they can operate it later when needed. The fees of tokens with already allocated fees will be locked, and existing regular fee tokens will have one chance to change.

The chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), Mike Selig, stated, "Today, we are taking action to release clear guidelines for prediction markets to help trading platforms understand the CFTC's expectations for new contract listings. We are taking on the responsibility of ensuring that this asset class has transparent rules."In an interview with CNBC, Mike Selig said, "Prediction markets are a rapidly evolving field, which is why we are taking action today to release some clear guidelines to assist our trading platforms. Our trading platforms will self-certify contracts and have their own rulebooks, and they need to clearly understand the CFTC's expectations. Therefore, we will publish these guidelines in clear written form for trading platforms to follow.At the same time, we will also release a notice of proposed rulemaking later today. We intend to establish clear operating rules for this new asset class and new market. It is crucial to ensure that there is no manipulation, insider trading, or various abuses in the derivatives market. Therefore, we will take on the responsibility of ensuring that these new asset classes have clear operating rules."

According to documents from the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, a federal judge in New York has approved the plaintiffs' motion for class certification in the market manipulation lawsuit against Tether and Bitfinex, and has divided the case into two groups of plaintiffs: spot investors and futures traders. It is reported that the case accuses Tether and Bitfinex of manipulating cryptocurrency market prices by issuing USDT from 2017 to 2019, resulting in losses of up to hundreds of billions of dollars for investors who purchased BTC and ETH.

According to market news, Musk acknowledged that in the multi-billion dollar lawsuit surrounding his $44 billion acquisition of Twitter, he stated that the tweet he posted "may not have been my wisest move," while the world's richest man is defending himself in court against allegations of market manipulation. He told a San Francisco jury on Wednesday that the tweet was not intended to manipulate Twitter's stock price, which was during the acquisition negotiations.A group of Twitter investors claims they suffered losses after Musk threatened to walk away from the deal to gain leverage in the acquisition talks, despite Musk knowing he was legally obligated to complete the $44 billion acquisition. After signing a binding acquisition agreement in April 2022 and waiving his right to conduct due diligence, Musk quickly began questioning the number of bot accounts on the platform.On May 13, 2022, he tweeted that unless the company could prove that "spam/fake accounts are indeed less than 5% of users," the deal would be "on hold temporarily." On that day, Twitter's stock price fell by 9% at the opening.

sDOLA LlamaLend suffered a flash loan price manipulation attack, resulting in a loss of approximately $240,000, including 6.74 WETH and 227,325 DOLA.The attacker manipulated the sDOLA price through flash loans and donations, increasing the exchange rate of 1 sDOLA from 1.189 DOLA to 1.353 DOLA. This price fluctuation caused multiple accounts in the crvUSD Controller to have health factors below 0, triggering liquidation conditions. After the attack contract acted as a liquidator and received rewards, it exchanged the funds, repaid the flash loan, and made a profit.

BlockTower Capital founder Ari Paul stated that market makers can indeed engage in short-term operations during weak markets, such as slightly pushing MSFT or BTC up by about 2% to trigger stop-losses, but such actions are usually day trades, and prices often revert within seconds or minutes, having limited impact on the long-term trends of liquid assets like Bitcoin ETFs.He pointed out that the primary reason for the recent BTC decline is the sell-off of tens of thousands of BTC by early holders, while market buying support is insufficient. Ari Paul believes that large-scale manipulation in the long term is not completely absent, but the probability is low and the risks are high. In most cases, deviations in market trends from expectations should not be simply attributed to "manipulation," and investors should optimize their own analytical frameworks. Meanwhile, compared to "downward manipulation," "upward pushing" is more common across various asset classes.

According to Arkham monitoring, the open interest of JELLYJELLY has surged on the OKX and Bybit platforms.Meanwhile, exchanges like MEXC, Kucoin, and Bitget have seen preemptive control of holdings, or may be engaging in price manipulation.

According to a report by the Korea Herald, the Financial Supervisory Service of South Korea announced its business plan for 2026 today, declaring a series of enhanced regulatory measures for the virtual asset market. The Financial Supervisory Service will conduct special investigations into high-risk areas that disrupt market order, focusing on typical manipulation behaviors such as "whale" market manipulation, "netting" techniques, and "racing" methods, as well as improper trading that spreads false information using API orders or social media.At the same time, it will develop artificial intelligence analysis tools to conduct second-level and minute-level analysis of virtual assets that experience abnormal surges, automatically identifying suspicious trading intervals and groups.To prevent financial IT incidents, the Financial Supervisory Service will introduce a punitive fine system and strengthen the security responsibilities of the Chief Executive Officer and Chief Information Security Officer. In addition, a comprehensive monitoring system will be officially operated to collect and disseminate information on cyber threats in the financial sector.The Financial Supervisory Service has also established a preparation team for the introduction of the "Basic Law on Digital Assets" to support the effective implementation of secondary legislation on virtual assets. The preparation team will develop a disclosure system related to the issuance and trading support of virtual assets and create a business operation manual for licensing reviews of digital asset operators and stablecoin issuers.

According to Financefeeds, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has charged three cryptocurrency market makers—ZM Quant, Gotbit, and CLS Global—with market manipulation. The SEC alleges that these three companies used algorithms to conduct fraudulent trading, creating artificial trading volume to deceive retail investors. Additionally, the SEC has also sued nine individuals, including promoters and company employees, accusing them of hiring manipulation services and executing meaningless trades, violating anti-fraud and registration provisions of the securities laws.As part of the investigation, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) conducted a sting operation using a fictitious token called NexFundAI, revealing these companies' willingness to engage in fraudulent trading. This case has led to the indictment of 15 entities and triggered related criminal proceedings.

According to Cointelegraph, the Financial Supervisory Service of South Korea has upgraded its virtual asset trading analysis intelligence system VISTA and introduced automated detection algorithms to combat improper cryptocurrency trading.The algorithm employs a sliding window grid search technique to automatically identify potential price manipulation ranges, reducing reliance on manual investigations. Performance testing has shown that the system has successfully detected all known manipulation periods and previously hard-to-detect abnormal ranges.The Financial Supervisory Service has allocated a budget of 170 million Korean won (approximately $116,000) for AI performance upgrades in 2026. Future plans include automatically identifying networks of colluding trading accounts, analyzing abnormal trading patterns of thousands of cryptocurrency assets, and tracking the sources of manipulated funds.

The multi-chain stablecoin abstraction platform River's native token RIVER has surged 1,900% in the past month, skyrocketing from about $5 last December to a recent $82, with a market capitalization of $1.6 billion, ranking 67th in cryptocurrency market value. The platform aims to eliminate the demand for cross-chain bridging of stablecoins, supported by BitMex founder Arthur Hayes and TRON founder Justin Sun.Hayes called for exchanges to list the token as early as January 6, and Justin Sun invested $8 million last week to support TRON's integration with the River ecosystem. However, blockchain analytics firm CoinGlass warned that the RIVER price may be subject to funding rate manipulation: first driving down the price to create a deeply negative funding rate, concentrating short positions, and then enticing traders to go long. The River protocol's TVL is approximately $161 million, significantly down from its peak of $605 million last October; its over-collateralized stablecoin satUSD has a market capitalization of $159 million, ranking as the 40th largest stablecoin.

The South Korean financial regulatory authorities are evaluating the introduction of a "preventive freeze" mechanism, allowing for the temporary freezing of relevant accounts before suspected price manipulation in cryptocurrency trading has been cashed out.The Financial Services Commission (FSC) is studying a trading suspension system, aiming to align cryptocurrency enforcement standards with those of the stock market to address the current issues of needing to apply for court orders and the delays in handling. This discussion comes as South Korea advances to the second phase of cryptocurrency legislation, which may focus on stablecoins and market manipulation. If implemented, regulation will shift from post-event accountability to real-time intervention, increasing scrutiny on high-frequency, automated trading and short-term abnormal fluctuations, significantly tightening the market enforcement environment.

The South Korean financial authorities are studying the introduction of a "payment suspension" system in cases of virtual asset price manipulation to prevent suspects from transferring or hiding illicit gains during the investigation phase.According to reports, the Financial Services Commission of South Korea proposed during a regular meeting last November to consider practices in the capital market regarding stock price manipulation, taking preemptive freezing measures on accounts suspected of manipulating virtual asset prices to restrict withdrawals, transfers, and payment outflows. The report pointed out that under the current system, the confiscation or recovery of illicit gains from virtual assets usually requires a prosecutor's investigation and a court warrant, which poses a risk of assets being transferred during this period. Internally, the Financial Services Commission believes that a payment suspension mechanism similar to that in capital market law could be introduced in the proposed "second phase of virtual asset legislation" to more effectively prevent unrealized gains from being disposed of prematurely. Relevant officials from the financial authorities stated that since virtual assets are easier to conceal once transferred to personal wallets, such a system may help strengthen regulation and asset preservation in the early stages.

According to the latest financial stability report released by the Bank of Korea, the activity level of the South Korean cryptocurrency market remains higher than the global average, at 157% and 112%, respectively. However, as Bitcoin is expected to surpass $100,000 in 2025, the behavior of South Korean retail investors has shifted from actively building positions to concentrating on profit-taking and significantly cashing out.The report points out that 91.2% of the trading volume in the South Korean cryptocurrency market is contributed by the top 10% of accounts, leading to an increased risk of market manipulation. The Bank of Korea warns that if institutional and ETF access is relaxed, the vulnerability of the South Korean market to global fluctuations will intensify. Currently, related hot money has shifted to the local South Korean stock market and leveraged ETFs in the U.S. stock market.

According to an official post from OKX on social media, they have found conclusive evidence that multiple associated accounts were collaborating to use a large amount of OM to collateralize and borrow USDT, artificially driving up the price. After the risk control team intervened, the other party refused to cooperate, and OKX subsequently took over the related accounts. Shortly thereafter, OM plummeted, and OKX only liquidated a small amount of OM, with the related losses fully covered by the OKX security fund.Multiple third-party analyses indicate that the price crash was primarily triggered by perpetual contract trading on non-OKX platforms, raising questions about the unusual source of OM and its highly concentrated token control. The OKX security fund operates entirely according to its designed mechanism.Currently, OKX has submitted complete evidence to regulatory and law enforcement agencies, and multiple legal proceedings are underway.