Company: HODL
Filing Date: 2025-03-26
Form Type: 10-K
Source: 0000930413-25-000995
Chunk: 73

Company: VanEck Bitcoin ETF
Filing Date: 2025-03-26
Form: 10-K
Item: Item 1
Chunk 73
---
AX platform. According to the CFTC’s order, during the relevant period
prior to the enforcement action, Coinbase operated at least two trading programs which generated orders that, at times, matched
with one another. Coinbase included the transactional information for these transactions, such as price and volume data, on its
website and provided that information to reporting services, either directly or through access to its website, resulting in a
perceived volume and level of liquidity of digital assets, including bitcoin, on GDAX that was false, misleading or inaccurate.
Additionally, between August and September 2016, the CFTC order finds that a former Coinbase employee intentionally placed buy
and sell orders in the Litecoin/bitcoin trading pair on GDAX, which he intended to match with one another and result in no loss
or gain while creating the appearance of liquidity and trading interest in

43 

Litecoin. Ultimately, the transactions
resulted in wash transactions that depicted a misleading picture of the Litecoin/bitcoin market.

In August 2017, it was reported that a
trader or group of traders nicknamed “Spoofy” was placing large orders on Bitfinex without actually executing them,
presumably in order to influence other investors into buying or selling by creating a false appearance that greater demand existed
in the market. In December 2017, an anonymous blogger (publishing under the pseudonym Bitfinex’d) cited publicly available
trading data to support his or her claim that a trading bot nicknamed “Picasso” was pursuing a paint-the-tape-style
manipulation strategy by buying and selling bitcoin and bitcoin cash between affiliated accounts in order to create the appearance
of substantial trading activity and thereby influence the price of such assets. To the Trust’s and Sponsor’s actual
knowledge, no regulator has brought charges against Bitfinex in connection with such reports, which remain unverified, and the
sources of the reports remain anonymous. The Trust and Sponsor have no actual knowledge of the factual truth or falsity of such
reports.

Fraudulent and manipulative trading practices
remain a risk at many cryptocurrency trading platforms. To the extent they occur at constituent trading platforms used to calculate
the MarketVectorTM Bitcoin Benchmark Rate, they could cause the MarketVectorTM Bitcoin Benchmark Rate to
report inaccurate prices of bitcoin, causing the NAV of the Trust to be calculated incorrectly and thereby causing Shareholders
to suffer losses.

The MarketvectorTM Bitcoin
Benchmark Rate Price being used to determine the net asset value of the