The Jane Street debate is one of those situations where both sides are partly right and that's exactly what makes it hard to resolve cleanly.
Ari Paul's case is straightforward: he spent years as a Wall Street market maker, and his read is that in genuinely liquid products — and $BTC ETFs are liquid — the kind of systematic suppression being described would require a sustained edge that market competition erodes quickly. Small moves, made and reverted.
That's the mechanics. Glassnode's James Check backed the same argument from on-chain data: long-term holders distributed heavily through late 2025, more than at any point since early 2024. CryptoQuant confirmed the scale. That's where the sell pressure actually came from.
The counter-case isn't crazy though. Jane Street is one of only four authorized participants for IBIT — it sits directly inside the ETF creation and redemption plumbing. Its 13F shows $790 million in IBIT shares, but a 13F only captures certain long positions. The full derivative book is invisible to the public. SEBI's 2025 enforcement action against Jane Street in Indian index derivatives — a cross-market coordinated strategy allegation — is what gives the theory temperature. It's a different market, a different regulator, a contested finding. But it makes "could they?" feel less theoretical.
What nobody has yet produced is trade attribution. No exchange data, no internal communications, no regulatory finding linking Jane Street to intentional $BTC suppression. The 10 AM pattern is real. The explanation for it isn't settled.