Bitcoin crashes, retraces gains amid unconfirmed US government dump rumors

Quick Take

  • The price of bitcoin has retraced its daily gains, and then some, in uncommonly dramatic fashion.

The bitcoin price dramatically crashed after a strong rally earlier today saw the foremost cryptocurrency once again reach $30,000. It is now trading below $28,000 after retracing all of its gains in a single hourly candle.

Market data indicates that the gyrations spelled trouble for both long and short positions. Liquidations have neared $200 million over the last four hours, according to Coinglass. 

While the exact driver of the dramatic declines is currently unconfirmed, prominent crypto news alerter "db" claims that Mt. Gox and U.S. government wallets are making transactions, citing market intelligence platform Arkham — which retweeted and responded. Arkham later deleted their response, which was a saluting emoji.

The Block reached out to Arkham for confirmation and further comment. Following the publication of this story, the crypto news wire DB reported that Arkham's alert was the result of an error sent following a bug fix. 

"Today we fixed a bug related to Bitcoin alerts that caused us to no longer under-send alerts to a small subset of user’s private labels. This was one of them," Arkham said in a tweeted statement. "This fix won’t affect any additional users, and was unrelated to labels generated by Arkham — we understand the impact alerts can make, and we recommend users double check and verify on-chain prior to making moves on the information."

RELATED INDICES

A bitcoin address identified as the U.S. government's storage point for Silk Road hack funds holds some $1.9 billion worth of BTC as of press time. A transaction did occur earlier Wednesday, but it was an inbound one worth approximately $0.19. The transaction is pending confirmation as of press time.

The price of bitcoin crashed suddenly today. Source: TradingView

(Updates with comment from DB about the Arkham alert being sent in error.)


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About Author

Adam is the managing editor for Europe, the Middle East and Africa. He is based in central Europe and was a managing editor and podcast host at the crypto exchange OKX's former research arm, OKX Insights. Before that, he co-founded BeInCrypto.com, which he elevated into one of the leading crypto media brands at its peak as the editor-in-chief. Earlier, he served as the editor-in-chief at Bitcoinist.com. Before joining the blockchain and crypto industry, he worked for Looper.com, Grunge.com and SVG.com. He tweets via @XBT002 and can be emailed at [email protected].

Editor

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