Company: HODL
Filing Date: 2025-11-13
Form Type: 10-Q
Source: 0000930413-25-003438
Chunk: 230

Company: VanEck Bitcoin ETF
Filing Date: 2025-11-13
Form: 10-Q
Item: Part II, Item 1A
Chunk 230
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 losses. In May 2019, one of the world’s largest digital
asset trading platform, Binance, was hacked, resulting in losses of approximately $40 million. In November 2022, FTX, one of the
largest digital asset trading platform by volume at the time, halted customer withdrawals and filed for bankruptcy, which revealed
a shortfall of customer funds. Shortly thereafter, FTX’s CEO resigned and FTX and many of its affiliates filed for bankruptcy
in the United States, while other affiliates have entered insolvency, liquidation, or similar proceedings around the globe, following
which the U.S. Department of Justice brought criminal fraud and other charges, and the SEC and CFTC brought civil securities and
commodities fraud charges, against certain of FTX’s and its affiliates’ senior executives, including its former CEO.
Around the same time, there were reports that approximately $300-600 million of digital assets were removed from FTX and the full
facts remain unknown, including whether such removal was the result of a hack, theft, insider activity, or other improper behavior.

In 2019 there were reports claiming that 80.95% of bitcoin trading volume
on digital asset trading platforms was false or noneconomic in nature, with specific focus on unregulated exchanges located outside
of the United States. Such reports alleged that certain overseas trading platforms have displayed suspicious trading activity suggestive
of a variety of manipulative or fraudulent practices, such as fake or artificial trading volume or trading volume based on non-economic
“wash trading” (where offsetting trades are entered into for other than bona fide reasons, such as the desire to inflate
reported trading volumes), and attributed such manipulative or fraudulent behavior to motives like the incentive to attract listing
fees from token issuers who seek the most liquid and high-volume platforms on which to list their coins.

Other academics and market observers have put forth evidence to support
claims that manipulative trading activity has occurred on certain bitcoin trading platforms. For example, in a 2017 paper titled
“Price Manipulation in the Bitcoin Ecosystem” sponsored by the Interdisciplinary Cyber Research Center at Tel Aviv
University, a group of researchers used publicly available trading data, as well as leaked transaction data from a 2014 Mt. Gox
security breach, to identify and analyze the impact of “suspicious trading activity” on Mt. Gox between February and
November 2013, which, according to the authors, caused the price of bitcoin