Early 2026, Bitcoin prices experienced intense volatility. Crypto market maker Wintermute frequently made large deposits on Binance during the New Year period, netting 2,654 BTC within three days, sparking strong market suspicions of institutional manipulation and once again revealing the paradox of transparency and fairness in the crypto world.
(Background recap: Bitcoin surges past $93,000! Taiwan stocks hit new highs, approaching 30,000 points, TSMC reaches a new high of NT$1,660)
(Additional context: Coinbase Bitcoin premium index has been negative for 20 consecutive days—what signals does this send?)

Table of Contents

• Malicious dumping or routine inventory management?
• The “Cyber Prisoner’s Dilemma” born from transparency
• Conclusion

At the start of 2026, Bitcoin’s sharp fluctuations once again put crypto market maker Wintermute in the spotlight.

During the most illiquid window of the global markets on New Year’s Day, Wintermute repeatedly made large deposits into Binance, triggering strong community suspicions of “institutional secret dumping.”

On December 31, New Year’s Eve, Bitcoin hovered around $92,000. On-chain monitoring data showed that Wintermute net deposited 1,213 BTC into Binance that day, worth about $107 million.

The transfer coincided with late-night European and American traders and the end of Asian trading hours, a well-known liquidity vacuum period. Possibly due to this selling pressure, Bitcoin quickly lost ground, falling below the $90,000 mark.

In the following two days, Wintermute maintained high-frequency net deposits. On January 1 and January 2, the institution net inflowed approximately 624 and 817 BTC into Binance, respectively.

In just three days, it deposited a total of 4,709 BTC into Binance and withdrew 2,055 BTC, with a net inflow of 2,654 BTC. Meanwhile, Bitcoin’s price accelerated downward on January 2, reaching a temporary low near $88,000.

This series of actions once again raised questions about the role of market makers. Supporters of the “manipulation theory” believe this is an institutional tactic to precisely target retail traders using technological advantages.

Malicious dumping or routine inventory management?

In fact, this is not the first time Wintermute has been caught in controversy.

Looking at its past track record, Wintermute’s funds have repeatedly appeared before major market shocks.

For example, on October 10, 2025, the crypto market experienced an epic liquidation of up to $19 billion, and just hours before the crash, Wintermute was monitored transferring assets worth $700 million to exchanges.

Additionally, from the SOL crash in September 2025 to the earlier governance proposal controversy of Yearn Finance in 2023, this leading market maker has been accused multiple times of “pump and dump” schemes.

Regarding accusations of market manipulation, Wintermute and its supporters hold very different views. The core dispute between both sides centers on: how to precisely define the line between “legitimate market making” and “malicious guidance.”

Critics argue that market makers deliberately inject liquidity during illiquid holiday windows to create artificial sell pressure, aiming to trigger stop-loss chains of retail long positions through human-induced volatility.

With deep cooperation with mainstream exchanges and insights into market microstructure, market makers can easily create fluctuations during low liquidity periods through large orders, profiting from wash trading.

However, Wintermute CEO Evgeny Gaevoy dismisses this as a “conspiracy theory.” In interviews, he emphasized that the current market structure is vastly different from the era of Three Arrows Capital and Alameda bankruptcy in 2022. Today’s market has higher transparency and more robust risk isolation mechanisms, and institutional fund movements are mainly aimed at inventory adjustments or hedging risks.

Gaevoy states that when order book imbalances occur, market makers must transfer positions to maintain liquidity, a behavior that may objectively amplify short-term volatility but is not intended for profit-taking.

In reality, the ongoing controversy stems from the lack of a universally accepted standard for judgment.

• In traditional securities markets, using capital advantages for false orders or deliberate price manipulation is clearly a criminal offense;
• But in the 24/7, highly algorithmic crypto world, how can one prove whether large institutional transfers are for market rescue or arbitrage?

This absence of a clear criterion leaves leading market makers like Wintermute caught between public opinion and their actual practices—viewed as the cornerstone of market liquidity, yet also recognized as an invisible hand that cannot be ignored.

Exchanges and some industry analysts tend to see market makers as a “necessary evil” in the market ecosystem. Without such major players providing bid-ask quotes, crypto volatility could spiral out of control, even triggering systemic slippage disasters.

But from the perspective of ordinary investors, the full scope of institutions’ capital, algorithms, and information advantage is hard to scrutinize. They can only infer results from on-chain traces. Due to information asymmetry, any on-chain activity can be interpreted as conspiracy theory, further fueling irrational market fluctuations.

The “Cyber Prisoner’s Dilemma” born from transparency

Beyond analyzing Wintermute’s micro operations, this New Year’s controversy actually exposes a long-standing, almost paradoxical contradiction in the crypto world: the pursuit of absolute transparency is increasingly becoming a vulnerability for institutional games and a source of market noise.

In traditional finance, the positions, inventory management, and internal fund reallocations of institutions like BlackRock or Goldman Sachs are generally opaque unless disclosed in quarterly reports or regulatory filings.

But in the blockchain world, privacy barriers have disappeared.

Blockchain’s core features—public and immutable—were designed to prevent fraud and enable decentralization. Yet, as we see, every inflow and outflow of BlackRock ETFs’ addresses, every transfer from Wintermute to Binance hot wallets, is like a public performance behind transparent glass.

Major institutions must accept that their every move is monitored and interpreted by tools as potential “dump warnings” or “position-building signals.”

Does this transparency truly bring fairness? The crypto world has always claimed “everyone is equal before data,” but in reality, this extreme transparency often leads to misinterpretation and collective panic.

For retail investors, the internal matching engines and order logic of institutions on CEXs are opaque; they can only infer outcomes from on-chain traces. This information asymmetry means any on-chain change can be read as conspiracy theory, further exacerbating market irrationality.

Conclusion

When everyone in the market is watching BlackRock and Wintermute’s wallet addresses, what we are trading might no longer be Bitcoin’s intrinsic value, but suspicion and emotion.

Information asymmetry is dead; cognitive disparity is eternal.

For investors, although today’s risk isolation mechanisms are more mature and frequent catastrophic failures are less common, the helpless feeling of “seeing data but not understanding the truth” has never truly disappeared. In the deep waters of crypto’s extreme game theory, only by establishing an independent cognition system that penetrates surface volatility can one find a sense of certainty belonging to oneself.