557
Views
2
CrossRef citations to date
0
Altmetric
Research Article

Bitcoin price manipulation: evidence from intraday orders and trades

, , &
 

ABSTRACT

We analyse 519.4 million Bitcoin orders placed on Gemini Exchange during January 2016-August 2019 and find limit orders dominate at 99.92%. We document order-based evidence of price manipulation during the Bitcoin bubble in late 2017, when the daily number of market orders during the bubble period more than triples the overall daily average. The changes in both prices and liquidity satisfy two criteria specified in Kyle and Viswanathan (2008) for the price manipulation definition. Moreover, we find a significant increase in market order imbalance associated with price manipulations modelled in Jarrow, Protter and Roch (2012).

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

Acknowledgments

Joon Ho Hwang acknowledges partial support from Korea University Business School Research Grant and the Asian Institute of Corporate Governance.

Notes

1 We thank the reviewer for insights about fake volume in cryptocurrency trading.

2 We repeat the analysis without the sample selection filter and obtain similar results, which are presented in an online appendix.

Reprints and Corporate Permissions

Please note: Selecting permissions does not provide access to the full text of the article, please see our help page How do I view content?

To request a reprint or corporate permissions for this article, please click on the relevant link below:

Academic Permissions

Please note: Selecting permissions does not provide access to the full text of the article, please see our help page How do I view content?

Obtain permissions instantly via Rightslink by clicking on the button below:

If you are unable to obtain permissions via Rightslink, please complete and submit this Permissions form. For more information, please visit our Permissions help page.