Official X account of U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has tweeted apparent confirmation of much anticipated Bitcoin spot ETFs, days ahead of expected official announcement.

Unfortunately it turned out to be "fake tweet" by someone who got unauthorized access to SEC's X account, and and the SEC was quick to disown this tweet in following statements.

Damage was already done and, according to CoinDesk, trades worth $90 million were liquidated as a result of this market volatility.

Damage didn't end with wiped out leveraged trading positions either. There was less quantifiable reputational damage to the SEC itself - let's not forget it was the Securities and Exchange Commission who in 2018 sued Elon Musk and Tesla for potentially market-manipulative tweets. What happened today on SEC's own X account was clearly market manipulation. Although it was almost certainly not carried out by SEC themselves.

We can only speculate as to who was behind this tweet, but, in my opinion, the most likely scenario is that someone at SEC media relations team might be bribed to disclose password or password was obtained long time ago in unrelated phishing attacks and sold to the party behind this attack intending to move the market for profit - ironically the very thing that SEC was founded to fight against.