Starting in 2026, we all got played by Wintermute - ChainCatcher

Author: Zhou, ChainCatcher

At the beginning of 2026, the sharp volatility in Bitcoin prices once again puts the crypto market maker Wintermute in the spotlight.

During the weakest liquidity window of the global markets around New Year’s Day, Wintermute frequently made large deposits into Binance, sparking strong community doubts about “institutional secret dumping.”

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

The transfer occurred precisely during the vacuum period when European and American traders entered late-night rest and Asian trading sessions were ending, a period widely recognized as the most illiquid. Driven by this selling pressure, Bitcoin’s price quickly broke below the $90,000 mark.

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

In just three days, it injected a total of 4,709 BTC into Binance, withdrew 2,055 BTC, resulting in a net deposit of 2,654 BTC. Meanwhile, Bitcoin’s price accelerated downward on January 2, reaching a phase low near $88,000.

This series of actions once again fueled market doubts about the role of market makers. Supporters of “manipulation theories” believe this is an institution using technical advantages to precisely target retail traders.

Malicious dumping or routine inventory management?

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

Looking at its past trajectory, Wintermute’s funds have appeared multiple times 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 $700 million worth of assets 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 selling pressure, aiming to trigger stop-loss chains of retail long positions.

With deep cooperation with mainstream exchanges and insights into market microstructure, market makers can easily create volatility 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 today’s market structure is vastly different from the collapse of Three Arrows Capital and Alameda in 2022. The current market system has higher transparency and more robust risk isolation mechanisms, and institutional fund movements are mainly aimed at inventory adjustment or hedging risks.

Gaevoy states that when order books on exchanges become severely unbalanced, market makers must transfer positions to maintain liquidity. While this may objectively amplify short-term volatility, it is not intended for profit-taking.

In fact, the controversy remains unresolved because there is no universally accepted standard for judgment in the crypto market.

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 verify whether large institutional transfers are for market rescue or arbitrage?

The lack of such a judgment dimension leaves leading market makers like Wintermute in a dilemma—viewed as both the cornerstone of market liquidity and 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 top players providing two-sided quotes, crypto volatility could spiral out of control, even triggering systemic slippage disasters.

But to ordinary investors, institutions wielding capital, algorithms, and information advantage can easily turn into tools for improper profit-seeking in an environment lacking rigid rules.

The “Cyber Prisoner’s Dilemma” Driven by Transparency

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

In traditional finance, the positions, inventory management, and internal fund transfers 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 is openness and immutability, designed to prevent fraud and decentralize, but as we see, every inflow and outflow of addresses related to BlackRock ETFs or every transfer from Wintermute to Binance’s hot wallet is like a public performance behind transparent glass.

Major institutions must accept that every operational move can be analyzed by monitoring tools as a “dump warning” or “position building signal” with strong guidance implications.

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 more misinterpretations and collective panic.

For retail investors, the internal matching engines and order logic of institutions on CEXs are opaque; they can only infer results from on-chain traces. Due to information asymmetry, any on-chain anomaly can be interpreted as conspiracy theory, further fueling market irrationality.

Conclusion

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

Information asymmetry is dead; perception asymmetry is eternal. For investors, although current market risk isolation has become more mature and frequent chain explosions are less common, the helpless feeling of “seeing data but not understanding the truth” has never truly disappeared. In the extreme depths of crypto’s high-stakes game, only by establishing an independent cognition system that penetrates surface volatility can one find a sense of certainty that belongs to oneself.

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