The manipulation of cryptocurrencies is getting attention from regulators who have been warning that these digital tokens, and the exchanges they are traded on, could be vulnerable to price manipulation.
The Wall Street Journal, citing the New York Attorney General Barbara D. Underwood, reported in September that the AG issued a report warning about the potential for the prices to be manipulated. “When any venue tolerates manipulative or abusive conduct, the integrity of the entire market is at risk,” the report said. Underwood said that bots were a source of the price manipulation. The paper noted that crypto traders can create bots to manipulate prices or purchase them over the internet.
“This sort of activity is rampant in the market right now,” Andy Bromberg, co-founder and president of CoinList, a startup platform for issuing new digital tokens, told The Wall Street Journal.
Stefan Qin, managing partner of Virgil Capital, an $80 million digital currency hedge fund that runs its own bots on crypto exchanges, told the paper that it has become a “cat-and-mouse game with enemy bots.” He said that earlier this year, Virgil Capital lost money on ether trades due to a bot.
“We’ve had to build in error-handling functions to check for hostile and potentially illegal activities,” Qin said. “Such is the Wild West of crypto.” He noted that Virgil eventually changed the algorithms so it wouldn’t continue to be harassed by bots.
In the summer, The Wall Street Journal reported that pump and dump schemes — in which an asset is talked up to drive the price higher before traders dump it for a profit — are making their way to the cryptocurrency market, with coin traders gathering in digital chatrooms to plot scams. According to the report at the time, the largest of a dozen the paper analyzed is the Big Pump Signal, a chatroom with greater than 74,000 followers that communicated on the messaging app Telegram. After launching at the end of December, the group talked up 26 pump operations that resulted in $222 million in trades, The Wall Street Journal reported. Other groups exist, which could reportedly add tens of millions more in activity. The other groups also operate in private chatrooms that require an invitation.
Despite rapid advancements in digital payments, healthcare transactions remain frustratingly slow and outdated. Patients accustomed to seamless digital transactions elsewhere are still dealing with lengthy reimbursement wait times and cumbersome billing processes. The culprit? Many healthcare providers still rely on legacy payment methods — paper checks, manual claims processing and outdated systems that create inefficiencies at every step.
This reliance on traditional payment rails isn’t just inconvenient — it’s costly. Research shows that 48% of healthcare providers still process claims manually, a factor contributing to rising payment errors and delays. Claims inaccuracies increased from 43% in 2022 to 55% in 2024, fueling a surge in denied claims and refund requests. Meanwhile, the rising complexity of healthcare billing is putting even more pressure on outdated systems.
At the same time, patient expectations are evolving. While just 39% of patients preferred instant healthcare disbursements in 2023, that number surged to 77% in 2024. Consumers now expect the same efficiency in healthcare payments that they experience when shopping online or transferring money digitally. Providers that fail to modernize risk declining patient satisfaction, delayed revenue cycles and operational inefficiencies.
The good news? Change is happening. Sixty-six percent of small to mid-sized businesses (SMBs) in the healthcare provider sector used real-time payments in the past year, and third-party platforms are accelerating the transition to digital disbursements. These innovations aren’t just streamlining workflows — they’re improving cash flow, reducing administrative burdens and enhancing patient trust.
In a time of rising healthcare costs and increasingly complex billing models, modernizing payment processes isn’t just an efficiency upgrade — it’s a strategic necessity.
The “Money Mobility Tracker®,” a collaboration with Ingo Payments, explores how healthcare’s reliance on outdated payment methods creates inefficiencies and how digital and instant payment innovations are streamlining financial operations, enhancing security, reducing costs — and, critically, fostering patient trust and satisfaction.