BTC/USD: Market manipulations sabotage Bitcoin’s rally, the research shows

Bitcoin fails to grow amid the global macroeconomic crisis, because its price is heavily manipulated, according to the researchers from the University of Sussex Business School.

A dedicated CryptoMarketRisk team tracked the transactions across the safe-haven markets since March 2020 and found out large spoofing orders on bitcoin derivative exchanges. 

The malpractices are frequent in the industry of digital assets as many large exchanges for cryptocurrency derivatives are not regulated. Thus, according to Carol Alexander, Professor of Finance at the University of Sussex Business School, Seychelles-based BitMEX allowed its bots to drive the bitcoin price below $4,000 in the middle of March

As the S&P 500 crashed in March 2020, gold had its worst week in eight years when it should have been its best, because of massive shorts on COMEX gold futures. Bitcoin has also been driven down by some pretty obvious manipulation bots on the unregulated crypto derivatives exchanges, especially BitMEX.

BTC/USD: Technical picture

Bitcoin peaked above $9,000 for a fraction of time and dropped back to $8,850 by press time. In the long-term time frame, the initial support is created by weekly SMA50 currently at $8,800. The overall picture remains positive as long as the price stays above this handle. Once it is broken, the sell-off may gain traction with the next focus on $8,600 with the weekly low located on the approach to this barrier. The next support comes at $8,150-$8,000. It includes 61,8% Fibo retracement for the downside move from February 2020 high.

On the upside, the psychological $9,000 is followed by $9,300. This barrier served as an upper boundary of the previous consolidation range. Once it is out of the way, the upside is likely to gain traction with the next focus on $9,600 and ultimately $10,000.

BTC/USD weekly chart