Crypto may be maturing, but it’s still small enough to be manipulated — and that’s not going away anytime soon.
On TheStreet Roundtable , LunarCrush CEO Joe Vezzani joined host Rob Nelson to talk about how whales, hacks, and even fake tweets can dramatically swing markets in seconds — all while remaining nearly untraceable.
“This market is still small enough to be manipulated. That’s the problem,” Nelson said. “Somebody with enormous amounts of money can influence this market — and they’re not stupid. They use it to make more money.”
Vezzani pointed to the recent Bybit hack as a textbook case. “There was someone that was short before that was announced,” he said. “Any market can be manipulated… but with crypto, it’s easier. There’s no real accountability.”
He compared it to a hypothetical Apple scenario: “What if someone hacked Tim Cook’s Twitter and posted: ‘Leaving Apple, this place sucks’? The stock tanks 5%, someone makes millions shorting it.”
Vezzani noted how bad actors like North Korea’s Lazarus Group have already exploited this space. “They stole money, were probably short somewhere, made more money, and turned all that Ethereum into Bitcoin. That’s a country. How are you going to go after North Korea for that?”
Social media, he warned, only accelerates the risks. “Even if it’s not real, it can still have this huge effect. Someone can make money short term on it.”
Still, Vezzani urges a long-term mindset. “Bitcoiners think, I’ll just buy and hold… put money in, and ride it out,” he said. “You’re never going to catch the very top or bottom.”
He also offered advice to young traders: “If you're 26 or 27 and running a startup, you're panicking. But my great uncle had a startup at 90 — sold it at 95. That guy was running a business longer than most of these kids have been alive.”