What Do You Get When You Mix Crypto Twitter, a Long Bear Market and a Top Exchange CEO? This.

Yesterday, BitcoinExchangeGuide reported about Kraken Exchange showing signs of suspicious trading. This story was reported by the Block Crypto, who are now facing flak for doing a “Hit-piece” on the exchange.

The Block claimed that an institutional account got stopped out at a market price below the stop order on Ethereum (ETH). ETH is a liquid asset on the platform, but the stop order was less than two basis points worth of the triggered volume on the candle down. Nonetheless, the investor claims that this was rare because of the type of volume that pushed the price on the exchange did not happen in other platforms. The institution had also several orders at other exchanges.

The trader said that $10,000 worth of Ether were able to push the price down 4% when there was $12 million worth of ETH volume in the last 24 hours. Thus, that means that trading volumes might not be exactly as Kraken shows.

Towards the end of the article, The Block toned down their rhetoric by saying:

“In fairness to Kraken, this situation is a far cry from the outright fraud and market manipulation occurring across a majority of illegal unregulated exchanges. The company also firmly asserts that claims of the exchange selling stop data are false, and this type of volume push is not rare at all. It does, however, highlight market structure complications still very present in crypto, especially with institutional accounts that have come to expect a certain level of service from legacy asset brokerage functions.”

However, this did not stop Kraken CEO Jesse Powell to calling out Mike Dudas, the founder of the Block Crypto.

Suspicious behavior on @TheBlock__ exemplifies the problems in taking on investors with a habit of terminating journalists. Obvious #deletecoinbase retaliation hit piece. @mdudas an epic Neutrino apologist but I get it — you're scared for your life. Only excuse for this trash.

— Jesse Powell (@jespow) March 13, 2019

Mike Dudas replied to him by saying that he is not going to be intimidated by his Trump rhetorical tactics. He adds:

“Nearly the entire industry disagrees with you. We get consistent feedback from nearly everyone we speak with that they're thrilled that a media and information property as high quality as ours exists. It shows in our ever-increasing reader and subscriber base. We'll keep it up!”

https://twitter.com/mdudas/status/1105857243713544194

Jesse later goes on to say:

“You didn't report “news”. You wrote a heavily biased and negative opinion piece based on a one-off tip from a random guy with no effort to corroborate and no effort to seek comment from the company. Of course, I'm going to defend myself. I will accept your apology as well.”

There are reasons to believe that The Block and Coinbase are in bed with each other and the block does hit-pieces for Coinbase. As Dudas himself admitted:

https://twitter.com/mdudas/status/1101470611631718400