CryptoATY

And we may have found who caused it.

Silver hit ATH $121.64 on January 29, 2026. Today it sits at $65, a 46% collapse, and 25% of that drop happened AFTER February 25, 2026.

Why does that date matter?

Meet Jane Street. They made $20.5 billion in revenue in 2024 with only 3,000 employees, more than Citibank and Bank of America who both have 200,000+ employees. They do not bet on markets going up or down. They bet on markets MOVING. 87% of their $662 billion portfolio is in options, which make money when prices swing hard and fast.

In Q4 2025, Jane Street bought 20.67 million shares of SLV, the most liquid silver ETF in the world, up from just 41,100 shares the quarter before. That is a 500x increase while silver was rallying hard, and nobody knew.

- January 29: Silver hits $121.64 ATH with everyone maximally long.

- January 30: Silver collapses 30% in 30 hours, the worst precious metals crash since 1980, with CME raising margin requirements mid crash and cascading liquidations making it worse.

- February 25: Jane Street's 13F filing becomes public and the world finds out they were the LARGEST holder of SLV the entire time, bigger than BlackRock and Morgan Stanley. Silver is now dowm another 25% after this disclosure.

So Jane Street built a $1.3B secret position while silver rallied, silver crashed 30% in 30 hours, the world found out they were the biggest holder only AFTER the crash, and silver dropped another 25% on top.

49% down total, sitting at $69 today.

Here is what most people are missing.

A 13F filing only shows long equity positions and does NOT show short positions, derivatives or the full options book, meaning Jane Street could have had a massive short bet on silver through options and nobody would know.

Step 1: buy $1.3B of SLV and become the largest holder.

Step 2: build a 10x larger options position betting on silver falling.

Step 3: use that size to push the price down, ETF loses a little and options make 10x back.

Step 4: nobody finds out until 45 days after quarter end when the crash is already done.

This is not just a theory. There is documented proof Jane Street ran this EXACT playbook in India between 2023 and 2025. SEBI wrote a 105-page order, the largest fine in their history, and impounded $570 million from Jane Street.

On Bank Nifty expiry days, Jane Street bought massive amounts of index stocks in the morning to push prices up while simultaneously building short options positions 7.3 times larger than their stock position.

Then in the afternoon they sold everything, the index dropped and their puts printed money. On a single day they lost $7.5M on stocks and made $89M on options.

The stock trade was just the cost of running the operation. SEBI found this across 18 expiry days and a whistleblower said it happened on 90 to 95% of all trading days.

In crypto, the bankruptcy administrator of Terraform Labs filed an 83 page federal lawsuit against Jane Street alleging they used inside information to front-run the $40 billion Terra/LUNA collapse.

When Terraform quietly withdrew $150 million from Curve Finance with zero public notice, a wallet linked to Jane Street pulled $85 million from the same pool within 10 minutes.

A Jane Street employee had interned at Terraform and allegedly ran a private chat called "Bryce's Secret" with insiders as a back channel for non-public information, and Jane Street allegedly avoided $200M+ in losses.

Blockchain forensics traced the wallet back to Jane Street through Coinbase records. Same pattern as India: get positioned ahead of the move, extract the profit, everyone else takes the loss.

The physical silver backing SLV is held by JPMorgan, who paid $920 million in 2020 for manipulating precious metals markets, the largest CFTC sanction ever, after admitting their traders placed hundreds of thousands of fake orders in gold and silver futures for 8 straight years with their top spoofer receiving 2 years in prison.

So the full picture: the silver backing the ETF is held by a bank convicted of 8 years of silver manipulation, and the largest holder of that ETF is a firm documented running a cash into derivatives manipulation scheme in India and facing a federal lawsuit for insider front running in crypto. Silver is down 46% and sitting at $65 today.

None of this is proven in a US court and the macro explanations for the crash are real.

But no regulator has asked the one question that matters: what was Jane Street's TOTAL net silver position on January 29 and 30, including the full options book and complete derivatives exposure?

Because if the India playbook was running in silver, the $1.3B ETF stake was just the cost.

The options position on the other side was the profit. And the 49% crash was not a crash. It was a payout.