Is The Bitcoin Price ‘Manipulated’? Strategy CFO Answers

Bitcoin’s late-year slump has revived a familiar online refrain that the market is “controlled” and price is being suppressed but Strategy CFO Andrew Kang said the manipulation thesis doesn’t square with Bitcoin’s scale, and that even large, highly liquid public vehicles struggle to move the needle.

Speaking on Natalie Brunell’s Coin Stories in an interview dated Dec. 30, Kang framed recent bearish sentiment as less about Bitcoin-specific weakness and more about how the asset still trades within a broader risk regime shaped by macro uncertainty, rate expectations, and tech volatility.

Is The Bitcoin Price ‘Manipulated’?

Brunell asked Kang to address speculation that Bitcoin has been manipulated “over the last quarter or so,” a narrative some commentators tie to the Oct. 10 liquidation event and the timing of an MSCI memo about potential index methodology changes for digital-asset-treasury companies.

Kang didn’t rule out that some actors may want to influence markets, but he dismissed the idea of a coordinated, systemic suppression plan as implausible at Bitcoin’s current market size.

“I honestly, you know, I think a lot of that comes from things that are fun to talk about,” Kang said. “Could there be minds that think like that? Most likely. But I think for the scale in which we operate, the magnitude of what Bitcoin is today in this market, it’s hard for any one actor to really manipulate the market. And for there to be a systemic sort of plan to do that feels a little far-reaching to me.”

He added that conspiracy narratives often get stapled to Strategy itself including claims that its equity issuance or weekly buying is “why this happened” but argued that the asset has grown beyond any single corporate treasury’s ability to steer price action meaningfully.

“The fact is Bitcoin is such a big asset class now,” Kang said. “Even Strategy has a hard time doing something that impacts it.”

Don’t miss my first sit-down with Strategy CFO Andrew Kang!

We discuss Strategy’s plan to keep accumulating Bitcoin, the asset’s underperformance in 2025, MSCI inclusion, whether there is “market manipulation” and much more. pic.twitter.com/yqGhQHadcW

— Natalie Brunell ⚡️ (@natbrunell) December 30, 2025

The Real Reasons For BTC’s Price Action

Kang repeatedly returned to the idea that Bitcoin remains an “emerging asset,” and that volatility is a feature of its current stage of adoption rather than evidence of hidden hands. He pointed to his own entry point in 2022, a year he recalled as a harsh lesson in downside moves, and argued that today’s sentiment doesn’t look uniquely Bitcoin-driven.

“To me [the sentiment] isn’t Bitcoin specific,” Kang said, describing Bitcoin as still “viewed as a risk asset within a broader macro environment.” He cited uncertainty around Federal Reserve policy and rate expectations next year, while emphasizing that the long-term “intrinsic values” Bitcoiners cite, like finite supply and store-of-value framing, “still persist.”

In one of his most emphatic passages, Kang laid out a sweeping view of Bitcoin’s long-run trajectory as Strategy’s rationale for continuing to raise capital and add to its balance sheet.

“There’s still more upside to Bitcoin. We know it’s going to go from where it is today to, you know, back to $125K, up to $200K, up to a million, up to 21 million one day,” Kang said. “That all still is going to happen. It just is going to happen over a period of time. And there’s going to be volatility associated with it.”

At press time, BTC traded at $88,730.

Featured image from YouTube, chart from TradingView.com

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