Bitcoin price on Bitstamp crashed by nearly 20% in minutes causing a $250M long squeeze

The price of Bitcoin on Bitstamp crashed by 18% from $7,600 to $6,250 from 2:58am UTC to 3:09am UTC; in just 11 minutes. Bitstamp is one of the two exchanges that is used to determine the index price of Bitcoin on BitMEX, along with Coinbase. As a result, as the price crashed on Bitstamp, $250 million of long positions was liquidated on BitMEX, which further pushed down price on other exchanges.

Bistamp said that "a large sell order was executed on our BTC/USD pair today, strongly impacting the order book" and reiterated that the system behaved as designed "processing and fulfilling the client’s order as it was received." Moreover, Bitstamp said that it closely examines every event that causes large-scale movement in its order book. 

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In another 15 minutes after the crash, the price of bitcoin has recovered and was trading above $7,000 again. At the time of writing, bitcoin trades at $7,300, which is about 4% lower than immediately before the crash.

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Larry joined crypto research full time in early 2017 and has expertise in capital markets, market structure and early stage DeFi companies/protocols and token economics. He has a background in economics and finance.