This week, rumors of a “10 a.m. bitcoin dump” blamed on quantitative trading firm Jane Street circulated online after the court-appointed administrator of Terraform Labs was sued, but market watchers said the data did not support a consistent, company-driven selloff.
The allegations come a day after Jane Street was sued by an administrator of Terraform Labs amid allegations of insider trading that fueled the May 2022 debacle of the algorithmic stablecoin ecosystem Terra.
Elsewhere in the market, demand for Bitcoin exchange-traded funds has rebounded after five consecutive weeks of net negative outflows. U.S.-listed Bitcoin ETFs have gained more than $1 billion for three consecutive days this week, with $254 million in cumulative inflows on Thursday, according to Farside Investors.
Corporate Ether funds have also come under pressure. Ether (ETH)’s corporate leader, Bitmine Immersion Technologies, suffered an $8.8 billion loss on its stock as the market continued to decline.
Analysts refute Jane Street’s claims, saying that Bitcoin is not easily manipulated
Cryptocurrency investors have accused the quantitative trading firm Jane Street of putting pressure on the price of Bitcoin with daily programmed sales in the US market, but analysts and market data show that this pattern is not consistent and no company can force Bitcoin into a long bear market.
The lawsuits come a day after Terraform Labs’ court-appointed administrator sued Jane Street, alleging insider trading related to transactions that exacerbated the May 2022 collapse of the algorithmic stablecoin ecosystem Terra.
Several market observers, including crypto influencer Justin Bechler, argued that Jane Street’s holdings of the BlackRock iShares Bitcoin Trust (ETF), known as IBIT, could mask short bitcoin positions through hedges that do not appear in public filings. Behler stated that Jane Street made an algorithm-coordinated sale of Bitcoin every day at 10:00 a.m. EST, manipulating the price of Bitcoin (BTC) to buy the ETF at a discount.
“While Jane Street reports that it has $790 million in IBIT shares, the proposal doesn’t tell you whether those shares are being put, offset by short futures, or collared, making the company’s net exposure to Bitcoin zero or even negative,” Bechler wrote, adding that “the actual position may appear to be a massive outflow that appears to be under disclosure rules.”
CryptoQuant head of research Julio Moreno cautioned that the activity described by Behler is not unique to one company. Buying spot exposure while selling futures is a common approach for delta-neutral funds to capture spreads rather than directional price movements, he said.
Jane Street’s latest 13-F filing also disclosed holdings in Strategy as well as significant positions in Bitcoin mining companies Bitfarms, Cipher Mining and Hut 8.
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Vitalik sells 17,000 ETH per month after allocating $45 million to privacy
Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin has reduced his Ether balance by around 17,000 ETH per month after announcing plans to allocate $45 million worth of tokens to privacy projects.
Buterin wallets tracked by Arkham held around 241,000 Ether (ETH) in early February before a series of withdrawals reduced the combined balance to 224,000 ETH on Tuesday.
The drop comes after Buterin continued to sell off, including about 2,961 Ether worth $6.6 million over the first three days of the month. Onchain analysts reported that this recently accelerated as he sold $7 million worth of tokens in three days.
Arkham Intelligence’s data shows that ETH sales are channeled through a decentralized exchange (DEX) aggregator using multiple smaller swaps instead of one large transaction, a technique commonly used to reduce market exposure.
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Bitmine’s stock losses approach $8.8 billion as Ether decline tests cyclical thesis
Corporate Ether funds are under increasing pressure as the crypto slump deepens, with analysts warning that the market is approaching a make-or-break stage in the Ether investment case.
Bitmine Immersion Technologies, one of the largest corporate holders of Ether (ETH), is sitting on a huge unexpected loss, as according to third-party tracker Bitminetracker, ETH is well below the company’s average purchase price. Some estimates put Bitmine’s paper loss at around $8.8 billion after Ether’s slide in recent months.
Data from Bitminetracker shows that the price of ETH has fallen by 60% over the past six months, well below Bitmine’s average value of $3,843 per token.
Crypto research center 10x Research said on Monday that Ether is now trading near values and values that test whether the asset is just in a cyclical downturn or entering a period of deep structural weakness.
“Therefore, investors should carefully assess whether assets are simply in a cyclical downturn or entering a phase of deeper structural impairment.”
Bitmine continues to buy ETH despite the paper’s growing losses. Last week, Bitmine acquired 45,749 Ether at an average total value of $1,992 per ETH, which shows the confidence of the world’s largest Ether storage company.
Big Wall Street participants are bullish on Bitmine despite the market downturn.
Bitmine’s top 11 shareholders, including Morgan Stanley, Ark Investment Management and asset manager BlackRock, all increased their exposure to the treasury company in the fourth quarter of 2025.
Data from Google Finance showed that Bitmine’s share price has fallen nearly 59% in the past six months, trading at $19.68 in the premarket on Monday.
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Aave has more than $1 trillion in lending under institutional expansion
Decentralized financial protocol Aave has surpassed $1 trillion in total lending, a first in DeFi history.
“Ten years ago, DeFi and Aave did not exist. They were just ideas. Today, Aave stands as the foundation of onchain lending, providing a new financial system that is open, global and unstoppable,” Aave Labs CEO Stany Kulechov said in an X post on Wednesday.
Kulechov added that this was another step towards Aave’s goal of becoming “the largest and most efficient payment network in the world”. “One where builders, banks and fintechs will be connected by default and fundamentally improve liquidity and cost structures across global finance.”
In August, Aave Labs launched Aave Horizon, a new lending market on Ethereum, specifically for traditional financial companies and other institutional investors to obtain stablecoins from real assets.
VanEck, WisdomTree and Securitize were among the first participants to use Aave’s institutional offering.
On February 15, Kulechov said that DeFi lending could benefit from the tokenization of “abundant assets” such as solar, batteries for energy storage, and robotics for labor. He expects these assets to total $50 trillion by 2050.
Kulechov first launched Aave as ETHLend in November 2017 before rebranding to Aave in September 2018. It now provides more than $27.2 billion in total value of the package and allows users to earn interest on deposits and borrow instantly using crypto as collateral.
Aave leads several well-known DeFi lending platforms at TVL, including Morpho, JustLend, SparkLend, Maple, Kamin Lend and Compound Finance, each valued at over $1 billion.
Aave has paid out more than $83.3 million over the past 30 days, nearly four times that of its closest competitor, Morpho.
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Curve founder says DeFi needs to launch token launches for real revenue
According to Curve Finance founder Michael Egorov, decentralized finance (DeFi) can no longer rely on inflationary token incentives to sustain growth.
In an interview with Cointelegraph, Egorov said that protocols should generate real income, not emissions, to attract liquidity.
“Your income should come from revenue, not from tokens,” Egorov told Cointelegraph. “You need real income.” He added that if the label “doesn’t do anything, it might be better for you not to label at all.”
Egorov compared the current environment to the “summer of DeFi” in 2020, when three-digit rates and even 1,000% annual interest attracted capital to new protocols. At the time, he said, speculative rewards drove the price of tokens and imposed the Total Blocked Value (TVL) for protocols.
He told Cointelegraph: “Currently, the news will no longer change the prices of the tokens,” stating that users have “reassessed the risks.”
According to DefiLlama, his comments come as DeFi TVL has fallen by nearly 38% in the past six months. Data from the analytics platform shows that TVL has fallen from $158 billion on August 23, 2025 to around $98 billion as of Monday.
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DeFi Market Overview
According to Cointelegraph Markets Pro and TradingView, most of the top 100 cryptocurrencies by market capitalization ended the week in the green.
The Pippin token (PIPPIN) rose 55%, the biggest gainer for the week in the top 100, followed by the Decred token (DCR), which rose more than 44% over the past week.
Thanks for reading our recap of this week’s impressive DeFi developments. Join us next Friday for more stories, insights and education about this dynamic space.
