Bitcoin Price Manipulated by Cryptocurrency Trading Bots: WSJ

Bots that manipulate bitcoin price are not new, and they aren’t going away, according to The Wall Street Journal. The problem continues to draw regulatory scrutiny, as it was cited by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) when it rejected several bitcoin ETF applications in August.

Andy Bromberg, president and co-founder of CoinList, which issues tokens, told the WSJ that the bots are rampant marketwide, at least at the present time.

Stefan Qin, the managing partner at cryptocurrency hedge fund Virgil Capital, uses its own bots to battle “enemy” bots on dozens of cryptocurrency exchanges worldwide. His company has built error handing functions to identify activities that are potentially illegal, referencing the crypto sector as the “Wild West of Crypto.”

How One Bot Manipulates The Market

Virgil, which specializes in arbitrage, suffered a “harassing bot” earlier this year that targeted certain ether trades, Qin told the publication, causing…