Following the bankruptcy of one of the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchanges, FTX, the price of bitcoin (BTC) has tumbled again. It is now about $16,500 – a far cry from the all-time high of $66,000 just a year ago.

Why such a large drop in value? It’s because of the highly toxic combination of an exchange (an electronic platform for buying and selling) called Binance, a stablecoin (a crypto whose price is pegged 1:1 to the US dollar or another “fiat” currency) called tether, and the skilled professional traders running high-frequency algorithms.

Unlike stocks, bitcoin can be traded on many different exchanges, but Binance has more than 50% of the entire crypto market, and as a result it sets the price of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. In order to buy cryptocurrencies, traders must convert fiat money, into a stablecoin like tether. Bitcoin-tether has by far the largest volume of all products on Binance, and because one dollar usually equals one tether, trading on bitcoin-tether sets the dollar price of bitcoin. But when bitcoin crashes, so does the entire crypto ecosystem.

The issue is that Binance is only self-regulated, meaning it is completely unregulated by traditional market regulators such as the Securities Exchange Commission in the US or the Financial Conduct Authority in the UK. This is a great attraction for professional traders because they can deploy high-frequency price-manipulation algorithms on Binance, which are against the law in regulated…