Curriculum·R407 Advanced Market Mechanics·about 34 min
Market manipulation literacy
By the end of this lesson you can
- →Classify a manipulation claim into one of seven mechanisms
- →Apply the five questions that separate a testable claim from an accusation
- →Explain why a correlation between an issuance series and a price is not a mechanism
- →State what you can actually do about manipulation, which is not detecting it
Senior · enrolled learners
This lesson opens with Is Bitcoin Really Untethered, published 2020.
- What happened
- John Griffin and Amin Shams published Is Bitcoin Really Untethered in the Journal of Finance in 2020, examining whether Tether issuance influenced cryptocurrency prices during the 2017 period. Using blockchain data, they reported that purchases made with Tether were timed to follow market downturns and were followed by sizeable increases in the bitcoin price, that the flow was attributable to a single entity, that it clustered below round price levels, that it induced asymmetric autocorrelations in bitcoin returns, and that the pattern suggested insufficient Tether reserves before month ends. They interpreted the evidence as more consistent with unbacked issuance inflating prices than with demand from cash investors. Tether disputed the findings and other researchers have questioned whether the identification establishes causation rather than association.
- The decision point
- This is the strongest form a manipulation claim takes in this market: a peer-reviewed paper in a top journal, using on-chain data anybody can obtain, with a stated mechanism and four separate signatures. It is also contested by the accused party and by other researchers, and per R405-04 it sits in a literature where four in five findings do not survive replication. Holding both of those at once is the skill this lesson teaches, because the alternative is either believing every accusation or dismissing all of them.
What you will be able to answer
- →What are the seven mechanisms?
- →What are the five questions?
- →Why is a correlation not a mechanism?
- →What can you actually do about manipulation?
Orientation and Year One are open: anyone can read them without an account. From Year Two onward the lessons are for enrolled learners, because progress through the later years only means anything if it is tracked against a record.
It is free. We do not sell the list and there is nothing to buy at the end of it.
Sources and review
- https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/jofi.12903
- https://www.jstor.org/stable/45286276
- https://www.cftc.gov/PressRoom/PressReleases/7156-15
- https://global-q.org/uploads/1/2/2/6/122679606/houxuezhang2020rfs.pdf
Confidence medium·Volatility medium·Reviewed 2026-08-07·Owner unassigned
Contested
The Griffin and Shams findings are genuinely disputed. Tether rejected them, and independent researchers have argued that the timing evidence is consistent with issuance responding to demand rather than driving prices, and that the identification does not rule out reverse causation. This lesson presents the paper as a high-quality, contested claim and takes no position on whether the conclusion is correct. That is the point of the lesson.
Nothing in this lesson is a legal characterisation of any party's conduct. The seven mechanisms are descriptions of trading patterns, several of which are lawful in some contexts and unlawful in others depending on intent and jurisdiction, and per J311-03's rule that determination belongs to a lawyer rather than to a curriculum.
R401-02 owns oracle manipulation as a position mechanic and the course autopsy owns spoofing. This lesson owns the taxonomy and the evaluation of claims. Keep the splits.