One time might be a coincidence, three times might be luck, but what about the tenth time?
Starting in the second half of 2025, some traders who followed Bitcoin's price movements on Twitter noticed something strange. They went through Bitcoin's intraday charts from the past six months and found it increasingly odd: almost every day around 10 a.m., during the few minutes when US stocks had just opened and market sentiment was at its most active, Bitcoin would experience a clean and sharp drop, precisely erasing all previous gains.
He posted his discovery on Twitter, and to his surprise, the comments section was flooded with people who had made the same discovery: "I noticed it too," "It's been going on for several months," "This is definitely not a coincidence."
Financial media outlet ZeroHedge went even further, tweeting one after another since July of last year, pointing directly to Jane Street, one of the main market makers for the Bitcoin spot ETF, as the mastermind behind the manipulation. After the 10 AM sell-off, Jane Street quietly accumulated shares, holding over $2.5 billion in BlackRock's Bitcoin ETF, IBIT.
They even gave this phenomenon a name: "Jane's 10-Point Sell-Off Strategy." And recently, what has reignited the widespread dissemination of this rumor is a lawsuit filed by Terra.
An intern named Bryce
Recently, the bankruptcy administrator of Terraform Labs filed a lawsuit in court against Jane Street, Jane Street co-founder Robert Granieri, and two traders, Bryce Pratt and Michael Huang.
This is an extremely low-profile firm on Wall Street. It never gives media interviews, never flaunts its profits, and for a long time, people outside the industry were unaware of its existence. But within the financial industry, the name Jane Street is almost universally known. This is an institution that has earned tens of billions of dollars through quantitative trading and market-making, and its annual profit per employee is unmatched on Wall Street.
The core facts alleged in the indictment are not complicated: on the eve of the collapse of UST (TerraUSD) in 2022, Jane Street used non-public information obtained from insiders to complete the liquidation of its positions in advance, and quietly withdrew from the entire Terra ecosystem before $40 billion vanished.
The starting point of this "insider information" transaction was a young man named Bryce Pratt.
Bryce Pratt had interned at Terraform before joining Jane Street. Logically, an internship at a previous company would be nothing more than a single, insignificant line on a resume. But the court indictment devoted three full pages, from pages 29 to 31, to describing him, for one reason only: he didn't truly leave Terraform after leaving the company.
He created a private group chat and brought in Terraform's software engineers and business development managers. The group was called "Bryce's Secret".
The name is quite straightforward and audacious. According to the lawsuit documents, the function of this group chat was to continuously transmit information from within Terraform back to Jane Street. At the same time, Bryce also acted as a go-between, introducing Terraform's head of business development to the head of Jane Street's "DeFi department," and the two began to communicate regularly under the guise of "discussing strategic investment cooperation."
From the perspective of the indictment, Jane Street actually turned this communication channel into a backdoor for continuously obtaining significant non-public information.
Jane and Terraform have a little-known history.
Let's go back a bit further.
Jane Street's relationship with Terraform didn't begin with Bryce Pratt's group chat; it started much earlier, in May 2021, when the UST first went off track.
During that incident, the UST briefly deviated from its dollar peg, causing widespread panic within the Terra ecosystem. To stabilize the situation, Terraform Labs began contacting institutional traders to make large-scale off-exchange arrangements. Jane Street was one of them.
According to the indictment, in this relationship, Terraform provided Jane Street with substantial trading volumes related to UST and Luna, and at certain stages offered discounts or structured incentives in exchange for liquidity support at critical moments. These terms were never disclosed to the public.
This means that the relationship between the two companies was not a simple market transaction from the beginning, but rather a contractual agreement binding their interests. It is precisely this relationship that makes insider trading allegations more difficult to refute legally. When you have a confidentiality agreement with the other party and simultaneously possess their undisclosed inside information, any transaction you make will appear highly unusual.
It was early 2022. At this time, the Terra ecosystem appeared incredibly prosperous: the Luna Foundation Guard (LFG) had just been established, absorbing approximately $5.5 billion in Luna reserves, and had used another $3 billion to purchase other assets, seemingly possessing an impregnable fortress. However, beneath this glamorous facade, some signs were beginning to emerge: the deposit size of the Anchor Protocol was starting to come under pressure, the UST's reliance on its peg to the exchange rate was increasing, and the rate at which LFG's reserves were being depleted was quietly accelerating.
Not many people know this. But Jane Street happens to be one of them.
Ten minutes before the collapse of a $40 billion empire
May 7, 2022, 5:44 PM Eastern Time.
Terraform quietly withdrew 150 million TerraUSD from Curve 3pool, a liquidity pool dedicated to USD stablecoin swaps. There was no announcement, no warning, and no public statement.
This operation was completely unknown to the outside world at the time.
However, less than ten minutes after this fund was withdrawn, a wallet identified by on-chain analysts as being associated with Jane Street withdrew 85 million TerraUSD from the same liquidity pool.
The indictment further points out that Jane Street's unusual behavior did not stop there. Before the UST de-anchoring became apparent and public panic began to spread, addresses associated with Jane Street had already completed a systematic risk mitigation, massively reducing their UST holdings and adjusting their positions to minimize net exposure to the Terra ecosystem. Some specific figures were obscured in the indictment, usually indicating trade secrets or that evidence had not yet been released, but the fund flows tracked by on-chain analysts are sufficient to illustrate the point.
Meanwhile, Terraform and LFG are doing the exact opposite.
On May 7, Terraform bought over 250 million UST tokens. On May 8, it bought another 200 million. In the following days, it accumulated purchases of over 1.9 billion UST tokens, plus over 90 million Luna tokens. As for LFG, by May 16, its UST holdings had surged from approximately 700,000 to over 1.8 billion, an increase of over 1.7 billion; its Luna holdings had surged from 1.7 million to over 222 million.
Another piece of evidence is a report published on May 27 by on-chain data analytics firm Nansen, titled " On-Chain Forensics: Unveiling the Mystery of TerraUSD Depegging ." The report doesn't directly name Jane Street, but details several wallets that played key roles in the depegging process, including an address later allegedly associated with Jane Street. The report concludes with only two points: first, these fund movements occurred before the apparent market panic; second, there was a significant time lag between these operations and the publicly visible crash.
An address suspected to be associated with Jane Street withdrew 85 million TerraUSD.
The indictment also alleges that Jane Street did not stop after the May 7th transaction. They allegedly continued to use confidential information obtained from Jump Trading to further trade TerraUSD and amplify their profits. Jump Trading had previously secretly agreed with Terraform to underwrite the price and ultimately profited billions of dollars from the crash.
They did the same thing in India.
Now, observant researchers have noticed that the 10 AM sell-off disappeared after Jane Street was sued by Terra. This seems to further confirm the rumors of a "Jane's 10 AM sell-off strategy."
On the other side of the world in India, regulators had already formed their own judgment on Jane Street.
The Securities and Exchange Commission of India (SEBI) issued a record fine of 48.43 billion rupees, or approximately $570 million, in a 105-page interim order. This figure is unprecedented in Indian regulatory history, and the SEBI's findings bear a striking resemblance to the allegations in the Terra Luna case.
SEBI believes that Jane Street implemented a well-designed "boosting" strategy in the Indian market.
The logic is as follows: First, in the relatively illiquid spot and futures markets, the Bank Nitty index is artificially manipulated by large-scale directional buy orders; once the price is pushed to the expected level, the reverse operation is immediately completed in the highly liquid options market to profit from retail investors who follow the trend; finally, the previously established spot positions are systematically dumped, causing the index to fall back, rendering the options held by retail investors worthless, while the value of the reverse positions held by the brokers soars.
SEBI cited a specific example in its report: On January 17, 2024, Jane Street established a long position of approximately $67 million in just 8 minutes, with a trading volume more than three times that of the market's second-largest participant. This single buy order drove the index up by more than 1%.
The regulators were blunt, calling Jane Street’s actions “influencing prices with trading rather than guiding trading with prices,” constituting a “deliberate, elaborate, sinister conspiracy and trickery” with the sole intention of misleading the market, especially by taking advantage of the large number of inexperienced retail investors.
Jane Street has long been a prime example of this narrative. Known for its extreme low profile, the firm never gives media interviews or boasts. It amassed astonishing wealth through quantitative trading and market-making, achieving a near-mythical status within the industry. Every recruitment season, its salary figures drive Wall Street graduates wild, making the competition as fierce as at any top institution.
However, starting at a certain point in time, the story of this company began to become complicated.
In the Terra Luna case, it was accused of using inside information to escape in advance, completing its withdrawal while Terraform and LFG were desperately trying to prop up the market with billions of dollars.
In the Indian market, it has been identified by regulators as systematically manipulating spot and derivatives prices to exploit ordinary investors.
Alameda Research, the core team of FTX, which dragged the entire crypto industry into its darkest hour, largely came from Jane Street, and its founder SBF also admitted that his market thinking framework was learned at Jane Street.
In addition, Jane Street is known for its aggressive prosecution of former employees, a level of advocacy rarely seen on Wall Street.
An earlier investigative report even linked Jane Street to weapons procurement funds in a coup attempt attempt in South Sudan, although details of the event remain conflicting.
The market is not a fairy tale; information is power, and information represents hierarchy.
Jane Street seems to have a longer history of misconduct than we thought, and its reputation has indeed suffered in recent years.
Although the Jane Street lawsuit is still pending, the fact that a company is involved in so many negative stories simultaneously is itself a signal.
