Whale Rakes in USD 9 Million as Bitcoin Market Slides

After a highly volatile weekend in the bitcoin (BTC) market, news came out on Sunday that a large trader on the popular crypto exchange Bitfinex may have raked in USD 9 million in a matter of minutes as the BTC price dropped.

Judging from a screenshot of the Bitfinex leaderboard posted to Twitter by the exchange’s chief technology officer Paolo Ardoino, the well-known whale J0E007 had unrealized profits of USD 9,097,371 in just 5 minutes after the sharp price correction that occurred on Saturday.

As the time of writing on Monday, J0E007 is also up for the week starting today by more than USD 6 million, as per Bitfinex’s leaderboard.

Due to his large buying power on Bitfinex, some members of the crypto community even accused J0E007 of being partially responsible for the sharp price drop, responding to Ardoino’s tweet with comments like “Joe revenge dumped the market,” and “Thanks for the cheap corn @J0E007.”

In addition, a popular crypto trader by the name filbfilb, who regularly shares updates with followers in a Telegram group, posted in his group “looks like finex whale dumped,” referring to J0E007.

However, in his Telegram post filbfilb also noted that the current decline is most likely just a temporary correction:

“I think there is a reasonable case to be made that this is the second correction in this uptrend, with the first two having been of roughly equal size. I said in Tone Vays show about how 20 and 24 Mas [moving averages] are normally good entries and until that isn’t true, I will remain bullish.”

Meanwhile, @J0E007 said in a tweet that “funny how it’s manipulation only when the price crashes.”

As of pixel time (15:20 UTC), BTC is trading at USD 9,607, down 3% over the past 24 hours, and also down by 3% over the past 7 days.