Finance
This Texas Finance Professor Sifts Data for Signs of Rigged Markets
John Griffin, who discovered the Bitcoin-Tether connection, seeks to expose “the fruitless deeds of darkness.”
Griffin
Photographer: Bobby Scheidemann for Bloomberg BusinessweekThis article is for subscribers only.
At the height of Bitcoin mania in December, when the price of the digital currency was climbing toward $20,000, finance professor John Griffin started digging into 2 terabytes of trading data—equal to a tenth of all the text housed by the Library of Congress.
His findings rocked cryptocurrency markets. Griffin and Amin Shams, his co-author and a doctoral student, zeroed in on an obscure and controversial cryptocurrency, Tether. Its price is pegged to $1. Part of the idea is that crypto traders can use Tethers as convenient stand-ins for U.S. dollars.