A few days ago we reported that a relatively questionable research had begun to spread in the crypto community. It was a research conducted by two university professors from the U.S. claiming that the 2017 crypto surge was a bubble caused by a single whale. The crypto community did not take long to react.

Professors Griffin and Shams blamed Tether and the minting of new USDT tokens at the time of the 2017 growth of the crypto market for the major part of this growth. Despite Tether and the Bitfinex exchange facing problems quite often and having had to explain things to the regulators a few times already, Griffin and Sham’s accusation, and their whole research is very “strange”.

Tether and Bitfinex also reacted to the research and spoke up very offensively against it. According to Tether, it is based on a minimum amount of facts. The authors themselves said they did not have all the necessary data and information from 2017. The dataset they chose also received sharp criticism for several reasons. Besides the fact that data had been specifically selected to evaluate cryptocurrencies, the whole research contained a number of assumptions and speculations. The professors did not have the particular details of certain transactions (key ones, according to Tether), either. Consequently, the entire research is very unsound.  

Besides Tether’s and Bitfinex’s official standpoint, the research has received harsh criticism even from several well-known crypto personalities. They criticized completely everything about it through various social media outlets. They also pointed out that millions of people and investors became interested in cryptocurrencies in that year, so it is unthinkable that a single whale would have been responsible for the massive growth cryptocurrencies experienced in 2017.