Jane Street is a major authorized participant in spot bitcoin ETFs. That’s not a conspiracy. But the mechanics of what APs actually do at market open explain more than most people realize.
Updated Feb 26, 2026, 11: 55 a.m. Published Feb 26, 2026, 10: 02 a.m.
Bitcoin BTC$68,016.02 has dropped like clockwork every morning after the New York market open since late 2025, and crypto fans on X are accusing Jane Street for causing it.
A theory on X has gotten retail participants pointing to the firm for single-handedly driving the asset from $125,000 to $62,000 in recent months.
However, market data and inner workings of an exchange-traded fund (ETF) authorized participant like Jane Street suggest otherwise, observers have noted.
CoinDesk reached out to Jane Street for comment on BTC allegations and did not receive a reply as of European morning hours.
This is INSANE.
Since Jane Street was sued two days ago, the 10 AM manipulation has stopped.
Bitcoin is up 10%, adding $120 billion to its market cap, and the BTC weekly candle has turned green after 5 consecutive red candles.
The total crypto market has added nearly $200… pic.twitter.com/4dCrFewTE4
— Bull Theory (@BullTheoryio) February 25, 2026
The allegations
The claim, spread across dozens of viral posts, goes something like this: Jane Street, one of the world’s largest trading firms, was systematically selling bitcoin at 10 a.m. ET every day to push prices lower and then snap up ETFs cheaply.
“BTC has been consistently dumping ~2-3% within minutes of the U.S. cash open (10 a.m. ET) almost every trading day since early November. Many traders point to Jane Street’s massive $2.5B+ position in BlackRock’s IBIT as the likely driver: engineered liquidity sweeps to accumulate spot ETFs at a discount,” Whale Factor, a widely-followed X account said in December.
The recent 13/F filings revealed that Jane Street held roughly $790 million in IBIT shares as of the fourth quarter of 2025.
Jan Happel and Yann Allemann, the co-founders of blockchain analytics firm Glassnode, have also documented these patterns through their shared X account Negentropic and said Wednesday: “Jane street Lawsuit gets made public, and miraculously the 10am $btc slam disappears.”
The allegations have exploded this week, after the firm was sued by TerraForm Labs’ bankruptcy operator for insider trading that hastened Terra’s demise in 2022. If that’s not enough, the 10 a.m. volatility has vanished in the wake of the lawsuit. Bitcoin surged by over 6% to nearly $70,000 on Wednesday.
In June last year, India’s SEBI banned Jane Street from local markets and froze $566 million in alleged illegal gains, citing a “morning pump, afternoon dump” scheme manipulating the Bank Nifty index on 18 derivatives expiry days from January 2023 to March 2025. The accusations, therefore, suggest Jane Street’s reputation precedes it.
Market data and logic suggest otherwise
The conspiracy that Jane Street has been secretly driving prices lower to snap up IBIT cheap could be challenged, however, using data tracked by crypto economist Alex Kruger, which doesn’t confirm the 10 a.m. dump.
The IBIT ETF has posted cumulative gains of around 0.9% in the 10: 00-10: 30 ET window; meanwhile, returns in the first 15 minutes have been -1%, according to Kruger. That’s noisy data, not evidence of systematic dumping, Kruger said on X.
Everyone says bitcoin dumps at 10AM every day.
I pulled the data, and it’s not true.
Since Jan 1, IBIT’s cumulative return in the 10: 00–10: 30 window is +0.9%, and in the 10: 00–10: 15 window it’s –1%. Noisy, not a systematic dump.
More interesting: the performance pattern in… pic.twitter.com/jboe0eehG0
— Alex Krüger (@krugermacro) February 26, 2026
More importantly, both windows closely mirror Nasdaq performance, Kruger added, which means the so-called “10 a.m. dump” was a part of broad risk-asset repricing, not Jane Street foul play.
Jane Street, it should be pointed out, isn’t a rogue operator with unfettered power over bitcoin, but a single player — an authorized participant (AP) — in a regulated ecosystem designed to ensure smooth trading of the ETFs.
“No single firm sits at a terminal pressing “dump Bitcoin.” But the structure itself—the ETF architecture, the AP exemptions, the shift to i