Is the Crypto Bull Run Keeping Bitcoin Under $20K?

The 2021 crypto bull market saw Bitcoin (BTC) fail to reach the $100,000 milestone, with analysis suggesting that the defunct exchange FTX kept selling BTC, thus suppressing its price strength.

Joe Burnett, senior product marketing manager at Bitcoin financial services firm Unchained, echoed this sentiment in an X post on Oct. 12.

FTX testimony reveals mass BTC selling

As the trial of former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried, popularly known as SBF, progresses, new evidence suggests market manipulation.

This week, Caroline Ellison, ex-CEO of related firm Alameda Research, reportedly told the court that Bankman-Fried asked her to sell BTC if spot price exceeded $20,000. This was done using FTX customer funds, which neither had the right to use.

Responding to this, Burnett suggested that the sheer scale of the operations could have had a negative impact on the entire crypto bull run.

“Alameda was insolvent even during the crypto bull market. It appears they employed (or ‘borrowed’) FTX customer bitcoin and other customer assets to purchase ‘Sam coins’ (FTT, Solana, and Serum),” he wrote, referring to reports that Ellison’s firm had a negative value of $2.7 billion in 2021.

SBF versu S2F

In November of the same year, the BTC/USD pair still managed to reach a record high of $69,000, although analysts had expected much higher numbers.

The then-popular Stock-to-Flow (S2F) Bitcoin price model, created by the anonymous PlanB, predicted a BTC price of up to $288,000 during the current halving cycle, with a “worst case scenario” of $135,000 by December 2021.

After Bitcoin failed to reach those levels, both the S2F model and PlanB himself faced a lot of criticism. Despite PlanB’s positive outlook on the future of Bitcoin, the SBF crypto bull run is becoming a source of amusement on social media.

On the other hand, some people do not agree with Bankman-Fried’s intentions. In response to Ellison’s statement, Adam Back, CEO and co-founder of Blockstream, raised the question of whether he was really trying to suppress the crypto market growth.