BitMEX says it is investigating unusual trading activity on its BTC/USDT spot market after large sell orders saw the price of bitcoin momentarily fall to $8,900.
BitMEX has disabled withdrawals for select users as it investigates unusual trading activity on its Bitcoin spot market.
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Posted March 19, 2024 at 1:23 am EST.
The price of bitcoin briefly dipped to a low of $8,900 on crypto exchange BitMEX late on Monday, with market participants attributing the activity to a “rogue trader” who sold just under 1000 BTC on the spot market.
The news was first flagged by X user “@syq” who noted that the trader sold nearly $70 million worth of bitcoin in installments of 10-50 BTC over the course of three and a half hours.
Now @BitMEX have disabled withdrawals pic.twitter.com/IvEq7t0Fp2
— syq (@syq) March 19, 2024
BitMEX has since disabled withdrawals for a few accounts after the incident, citing an issue with its spot markets trading platform.
“Just to clarify: We have NOT disabled withdrawals for all users, but only for a few accounts that are part of the investigation,” said the BitMEX team in a post on X.
Responding to another screenshot posted on X of the rapid sell orders earlier in the day, the BitMEX team said it was looking into the unusual activity involving the user selling large orders on the BTC/USDT spot market.
“This does not affect any of our derivative markets, nor the index price for our popular XBT derivatives contracts,” the team clarified, adding that, “the trading platform is operating as normal and all funds are safe.”
Flash crashes like this one are typically caused by large sell orders that trigger benchmarks for sell orders at lower prices, creating a sort of domino effect that results in the asset’s price dropping sharply in value.
In 2017, the price of ethereum crashed to a low of 10 cents from around $319 on Coinbase-owned crypto exchange Global Digital Assets Exchange (GDAX), which the firm blamed on a “multimillion dollar market sell order.”
