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.”

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By Matt Robinson and Nick Baker

October 12, 2018 at 5:00 AM EDT

This article is for subscribers only.

This article is part of the October 15, 2018 issue of businessweek.

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.