Share
Crypto markets added roughly $200 billion in market cap over 48 hours ending February 25, 2026. Bitcoin briefly touched $70,000, Ethereum gained over 13%, and Solana surged 15% as total market cap climbed toward $2.5 trillion.
Also, $323 million in short positions were liquidated, ETF net inflows hit $257.7 million, the highest since early February 2026, and Bitcoin’s RSI had been sitting around 15-20, even entering its lowest since the March 2020 crash. The bounce, in technical terms, was overdue.
What made this one different was the narrative attached to it.
On February 23, 2026, Todd Snyder, the Terraform Labs bankruptcy administrator, filed suit against Jane Street, alleging the firm withdrew roughly $85 million in UST liquidity from Curve pools within minutes of Terraform’s own withdrawal on May 7, 2022, shortly before the Terra ecosystem imploded.
That timing is documented on-chain with timestamps, making it among the more concrete elements of the case. Jane Street has denied all allegations, calling the lawsuit “baseless” and attributing Terra’s collapse to management’s own fraud.
Separately, and it’s important to make this distinction, crypto social media had spent months attributing a recurring intraday price pattern to Jane Street.
A December 2025 chart circulating on X showed BTC dropping hundreds of dollars within minutes on December 1, 5, 8, 10, 12, and 15, and again throughout January and February 2026, a pattern traders dubbed the “10-Point Strike.”
There have been persistent whispers in crypto circles about certain institutional trading desks running a very specific/shady playbook…
(Jane Street included.)
ICYMI: Jane Street just ranked as one of the top net buyers of BlackRock's Bitcoin ETF ($IBIT) in Q4 2025.
Their… https://t.co/1nB2jcf7ub pic.twitter.com/LOnxy0AEKn
— Milk Road (@MilkRoad) February 17, 2026
The theory is that Jane Street, as one of only four Authorized Participants for BlackRock’s IBIT, used its position to sell Bitcoin around 10 a.m. Eastern, triggering retail liquidations before buying back lower.
According to Bull Theory, a crypto research page on X, a similar pattern reportedly occurred in Indian markets, where Jane Street employed aggressive short-selling tactics which yielded $4.23 billion in profits and led to a temporary SEBI ban.
This is SHOCKING.
Jane Street’s secret trading technique is to accumulate shares, then dump them in seconds to crash the price and profit from shorts.
They ran the same 10 AM manipulation algo in Indian markets and made $4.23 billion, which led to a temporary ban by the… pic.twitter.com/0rnYtz3kKz
— Bull Theory (@BullTheoryio) February 26, 2026
The alleged playbook follows a repeatable cycle:
🚨IS JANE STREET ALSO BEHIND THE OCTOBER 10TH CRASH, THE LARGEST LIQUIDATION EVENT IN CRYPTO HISTORY?
Look at the pattern.
Jane Street:
• Made $10B in trading revenue in a single quarter, more than major Wall Street banks.
• Banned from India’s markets after regulators… https://t.co/MT35kBYxFd pic.twitter.com/D7WwthsHbC— Bull Theory (@BullTheoryio) February 25, 2026
As of 2026, Jane Street reportedly has $560 million frozen in an escrow account with SEBI related to the ongoing India manipulation case.
Shortly after the lawsuit gained traction, observers noted Jane Street’s X account appeared to have removed all prior posts. The timing prompted widespread speculation, though Jane Street has not commented publicly and no direct link between the deletion and the lawsuit has been established.
Whilst the claims may yet have credence, it’s important to treat the causation claim with care until such is established.
Permabulls will probably use the recently exposed Jane Street insider trading as the next narrative to “explain how” $BTC can make new all-time highs this year.
They’ll argue that there “will be no more 10am sell pressure”, since Jane Street was the one manipulating things and… https://t.co/Xj0WLlkYM4 pic.twitter.com/6vU7lORUDU
— 𝙲𝚘𝚕𝚒𝚗 𝚃𝚊𝚕𝚔𝚜 𝙲𝚛𝚢𝚙𝚝𝚘 🪙 (@ColinTCrypto) February 26, 2026
Jeff Park, CIO at ProCap and adviser to Bitwise, said the debate reflects a misunderstanding of ETF market structure, specifically how the creation and redemption process allows APs to meet demand without buying or selling Bitcoin on public exchanges, muting price moves in ways that look suspicious but are mechanically routine.
ETF analyst McMillin added that when futures positions are reduced due to macro shifts or narrowing spreads, the adjustment can amplify sharp pullbacks that appear sudden to retail, and that this behavior is legal and consistent with how ETFs are designed to operate.
This conspiracy theory doesn’t hold up. Hedging short IBIT positions with long futures means that some other party will (on average) end up holding a short futures position that they have to hedge with a long spot position.
The sum of all positions in the market, converted to…
— Keone Hon (@keoneHD) February 26, 2026
Monad co-founder also pushed back on X, arguing that shorting IBIT cannot unilaterally depress prices and that the mechanism being described doesn’t hold up structurally.
The Terra lawsuit has legal teeth. Potentially all the paperwork with blockchain timestamps, documented liquidity movements, and a credible plaintiff. Whether Jane Street’s alleged 2022 behavior constitutes insider trading is for the courts to determine.
However, “10am dump” theory is a different claim and could be entirely circumstantial. It remains unverified by any regulator, and vulnerable to the simpler explanation that 10am Eastern is the highest-liquidity window of the crypto trading day, when CME futures open, ETF arbitrage runs, and institutional rebalancing naturally concentrates.
What remains structurally significant is that Jane Street held $5.7 billion in IBIT shares as of Q3 2025, sits atop Bitcoin’s institutional plumbing as an AP, and operates with limited public disclosure obligations. APs “wield hedge-fund-like incentives and tools with less accountability in a volatile, adoption-stage asset,” as one analyst put it.
Whether that constitutes manipulation or simply efficient markets is precisely the question this episode has forced into the open, and the answer will shape how retail and institutional participants think about Bitcoin’s price discovery for years.
Share
