Author: zhou, ChainCatcher
At the beginning of 2026, the sharp fluctuations in Bitcoin prices have once again brought the crypto market maker Wintermute into the spotlight.
During the global market's weakest liquidity window on New Year's Day, Wintermute frequently injected large amounts into Binance, raising strong suspicions in the community about "institutional secret dumping."
On the night of December 31, Bitcoin's price hovered around $92,000. On-chain monitoring data showed that Wintermute net deposited 1,213 Bitcoins into Binance that day, worth approximately $107 million.
The timing of the transfer coincided with the late-night rest period for European and American traders and the closing phase of the Asian trading session, which is recognized as a true vacuum period with the least liquidity. Under the pressure of this selling, Bitcoin's price quickly fell below the $90,000 mark.
In the following two days, Wintermute continued to maintain a high-frequency net deposit trend. On January 1 and January 2, the institution net flowed into Binance approximately 624 and 817 Bitcoins, respectively.
In just three days, it cumulatively injected 4,709 Bitcoins into Binance, withdrew 2,055 Bitcoins, and achieved a cumulative net deposit of 2,654 Bitcoins. Meanwhile, Bitcoin's price accelerated downward on January 2, reaching a temporary low near $88,000.
This series of actions has once again plunged the market into doubts about the role of market makers. Investors supporting the "manipulation theory" believe this is a case of institutions using their technical advantages to precisely hunt retail investors.
Malicious Dumping or Routine Inventory Management?
In fact, this is not the first time Wintermute has been caught in the whirlpool of public opinion.
Looking back at its past trajectory, Wintermute's funding presence has repeatedly appeared on the eve of significant 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 detected transferring a massive $700 million in assets to exchanges.
Additionally, from the SOL crash in September 2025 to the earlier governance proposal turmoil of Yearn Finance in 2023, this leading market maker has faced accusations of "pump and dump" multiple times.
In response to the accusations of market manipulation, Wintermute and its supporters hold a starkly different position. The core dispute in the ongoing battle revolves around how to precisely define the red line between "legitimate market making" and "malicious guidance."
Critics argue that market makers deliberately choose liquidity-dry holiday windows to inject spot liquidity, aiming to artificially create selling pressure and precisely trigger the stop-loss chains of retail long positions.
With deep cooperative relationships with mainstream exchanges and insights into market microstructure, market makers can easily create volatility through large orders during low liquidity periods, thus profiting from the washout.
However, Wintermute's CEO Evgeny Gaevoy dismissed this as a "conspiracy theory." He emphasized in interviews that today's market structure is no longer comparable to the bankruptcy periods of Three Arrows Capital and Alameda in 2022. The current market system has higher transparency and more robust risk isolation mechanisms, and institutional capital allocation is primarily aimed at adjusting inventory or hedging risks.
Gaevoy stated that when there is a severe imbalance in buy and sell orders on exchanges, market makers must transfer positions to maintain liquidity supply. This behavior may objectively amplify short-term volatility, but subjectively, it is not intended for harvesting.
In fact, the controversy remains unresolved, rooted in the lack of a recognized judgment benchmark in the crypto market.
In traditional securities markets, using capital advantages for false orders or deliberate price manipulation is a clear criminal offense; however, in the 24/7, highly algorithmic world of crypto, how can one prove whether an institution's large transfers are for market rescue or arbitrage?
This lack of a definitive judgment dimension keeps leading market makers like Wintermute in the crossfire of public opinion—viewed as the cornerstone of market liquidity while also recognized as an undeniable "invisible hand."
Exchanges and some industry analysts tend to believe that market makers are a "necessary evil" in the market ecosystem. Without such leading players providing bid-ask quotes, the volatility of cryptocurrencies could spiral out of control, potentially triggering systemic slippage disasters.
However, from the perspective of ordinary investors, institutions wielding capital, algorithms, and information have an overwhelming advantage, which, in the absence of rigid regulatory constraints, inevitably becomes a tool for improper profit-seeking.
The "Cyber Prisoner's Dilemma" Created by Transparency
In analyzing Wintermute's micro-operations, this New Year's incident has actually exposed a long-standing, almost paradoxical contradiction in the crypto world: the absolute transparency we pursue is increasingly becoming a soft spot for institutional games and a source of market noise.
In traditional finance, the position adjustments, inventory management, and internal capital allocations of institutions like BlackRock or Goldman Sachs are generally difficult for outsiders to glimpse unless they appear in quarterly reports or regulatory disclosures.
But in the world of blockchain, the privacy barrier has disappeared.
The essence of blockchain is openness and immutability, designed to prevent fraud and promote decentralization. However, as we have seen, every inflow and outflow related to BlackRock's ETF addresses, and every transfer from Wintermute to Binance's hot wallet, is like a public performance in a transparent glass house.
The fact that institutional giants must accept is that every operational dynamic they undertake will be interpreted by monitoring tools as highly directional "dump warnings" or "position building signals."
Does this transparency truly bring fairness? The crypto world has long touted "everyone is equal before data," but the reality is that this extreme transparency has instead given rise to more misinterpretations and collective panic.
For retail investors, the matching engines and order logic of institutions within centralized exchanges are difficult to discern; they often can only infer results through on-chain traces. Due to information asymmetry, any on-chain anomaly can be interpreted as a conspiracy theory, further exacerbating irrational market fluctuations.
Conclusion
When everyone in the market is focused on the wallet addresses of BlackRock and Wintermute, what we are trading may no longer be the value of Bitcoin itself, but rather suspicion and emotion.
The information gap has died, but the cognitive gap lives on. For investors, although the current market risk isolation is becoming more mature and no longer prone to chain explosions, the sense of powerlessness of "seeing the data but not understanding the truth" seems to have never disappeared. In the extreme game of crypto, establishing an independent cognitive system that penetrates surface fluctuations is the only way to find a certainty that belongs to oneself.
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