BlockTower Capital Founder: The impact of market makers is mostly intraday volatility, and the main reason for BTC's decline is the selling by early holders

BlockTower Capital founder Ari Paul stated that market makers can indeed engage in short-term operations during weak markets, such as slightly pushing MSFT or BTC up by about 2% to trigger stop-losses, but such actions are usually day trades, and prices often revert within seconds or minutes, having limited impact on the long-term trends of liquid assets like Bitcoin ETFs.

He pointed out that the primary reason for the recent BTC decline is the sell-off of tens of thousands of BTC by early holders, while market buying support is insufficient. Ari Paul believes that large-scale manipulation in the long term is not completely absent, but the probability is low and the risks are high. In most cases, deviations in market trends from expectations should not be simply attributed to "manipulation," and investors should optimize their own analytical frameworks. Meanwhile, compared to "downward manipulation," "upward pushing" is more common across various asset classes.