Bitcoin temporarily fell below $9,000 during the night of March 18-19 at Bitmex.
Brief collapse of bitcoin on Bitmex
Bitcoin briefly fell 86% on Bitmex. It took sales representing barely a few hundred bitcoins to overwhelm this exchange registered in the Seychelles.
Such a drop is the mark of a shallow order book. According to coinglass, there are only 12,700 BTC at Bitmex. This is much less than Binance, Bitfinex or even Coinbase which host 543,000, 375,000 and 344,000 bitcoins respectively.
Here is the evolution of the price of bitcoin at Bitmex last night:
“Someone has just sold 400 bitcoins in 2 hours in bursts of 10 to 50 BTC on the BTC/USDT pair on Bitmex, earning a spread of 30%. They must have lost at least $4 million.”said @syq on X.
In other words, someone probably placed a large sell order at the spot price before closing their computer. Faced with the empty order book, sell orders were probably triggered automatically at extremely low levels. Hence the loss of several million dollars.
Indeed, the total volume of these sell orders below the true market price represented almost 1,000 bitcoins. One order was filled as low as $8,900.
BitMEX has temporarily blocked withdrawals from accounts involved in these price movements and is currently investigating:
“This morning’s BTC sell orders were simply too large and too frequent for independent market makers and other traders to react to. As usual, our compliance team is investigating the accounts and transactions that triggered this price movement.
Until we see things more clearly, our trading platform continues to operate normally. All transactionse run smoothly and all funds are safe. Deposits and withdrawals are processed as usual, often within minutes. »
Bitmex’s reputation will take another hit. It is a scandal that such market aberrations are still taking place on this exchange which has existed for a decade now.
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