Reports that a single trader manipulated the market into elevating the price of Bitcoin to around $20,000 USD by the end of 2017 started to appear this week. Now, the CEO of Circle, Jeremy Allaire, has affirmed that the research which was done on the subject is completely wrong.

In a series of tweets, Allaire explained that the whole accusation consisted of “extremely weak reporting” and that the people who reported it did not understand how stablecoins work. Allaire did not see any logic in the idea that a single Tether trader could actually be engaged in manipulation and to be so successful.

1/ Extremely weak reporting from @WSJ and @paulvigna who even after speaking with them seem to completely misunderstand how stablecoins work and how $'s flow into and across exchanges.https://t.co/VqPsohqxNv

— Jeremy Allaire (@jerallaire) November 4, 2019

According to him, exchanges often use wallets that pool the assets of customers together. This could be why some people believed that it was a single trader, as it was a single wallet, but it was an exchange wallet, so obviously, the money would be moved around a lot.

Bruce Fenton, who worked in the Bitcoin Foundation some time ago, also criticized how the data was assembled. He affirmed that the whole thing was a huge misunderstanding of how stablecoins actually work, an idea that resonates with Allaire.

Also, the issuance of more Tether is not directly correlated to Bitcoin’s price. When BTC reached its all-time high, the market cap of Tether was around $1 billion USD. Right now, BTC stands at around 50% of its all-time high and the market cap of Tether is around $4 billion USD.

This means that there is no easy answer here. It wasn’t a single person who manipulated the market. Several factors have to be taken into account to explain what happened at the end of 2017.