Kraken CEO Jesse Powell has had a heated Twitter conversation with The Block founder Mike Dudas. Powell explicitly criticized Dudas for presenting ‘factually inaccurate statements’ in an article that accused Kraken of reporting fake trading volumes.
You didn't report "news". You wrote a heavily biased and negative opinion piece based on a one-off tip from a random guy with no effort to corroborate and no effort to seek comment from the company. Of course I'm going to defend myself. I will accept your apology as well.
— Jesse Powell (@jespow) March 13, 2019
A tip-off from an anonymous trader
The hit piece that was published by The Block on March 13 cites an anonymous trader who allegedly revealed how an institutional account executed a stop order ‘well below’ the set price. 10K worth of Ethereum (ETH) was enough for the asset’s price to dip 4 percent, which could be an indicator that Kraken wouldn’t report its true trading volumes.
False and misleading information
In response, Powell claims that the assumptions and conclusions that were presented in the article are factually false. Hence, it proves that the ‘trader’ behind the tip-off never had any basic understanding of the market. Apart from that, the article contains a lot of blatantly misleading information. For instance, the ‘10K worth of Ethereum’ remark would make uninitiated readers believe that $10,000 (or 76.28 ETH at the time of writing this article) would be able to affect the ETH price.
It was not accurately reported. There are numerous false and misleading statements in the piece. Since nobody over there seems to have a clue wtf is going on, I did your editor's job for you. Here ya go: pic.twitter.com/JnoeYqbn8W
— Jesse Powell (@jespow) March 13, 2019
Is The Block in bed with Coinbase?
Prior to that, Powell accused Dudas of being ‘an epic Neutrino apologist’ for trying to silence the #DeleteCoinbase controversy. The Block writer Larry Cermak claimed that Coinbase has no influence on their coverage, but Powell didn’t buy that.
Your coverage of Coinbase's murderous past looks like coverage of a stop loss. Your coverage of a stop loss looks like coverage of a murderous past.
— Jesse Powell (@jespow) March 13, 2019Advertisement
With that being said, The Block readers have every right to be concerned about a potential conflict of interests. Dudas himself claimed that he has ‘multiple good friends’ from Coinbase, and the $8 bln exchange actually invested in his media company on top of that all.
I ♥ @Coinbase:
— Mike Dudas (@mdudas) March 1, 2019
* they introduced me to cryptocurrency
* they supported my largest purchases of cryptocurrency
* multiple good friends there over years
* they invested in The Block
As a journalist + lover of freedom, I'm devastated by the hiring of The Hacking Team members.
