TL;DR

• Bitcoin’s price very briefly tanked to $8.9K on BitMEX, after a whale dumped 400 BTC within 2hrs on the platform.

Full Story

Uhhhhhh — how the heck did this happen??

Out of thin air, Bitcoin’s price tanked to $8.9k on BitMEX. 

Here’s the how and why of it all:

At any given time, a bunch of crypto exchanges are within pennies of the same BTC price, let's say, $60k. 

The thing is: exchanges are never the exact same because the price is an average estimate of future prices based on previous, but recent, transactions on each exchange. 

Basically, the exchanges are playing a game of “let's guess the current price by looking at the very recent past.”

Well! BitMEX ended up having some wild transactions yesterday. 

Someone sold 400 BTC in a 2 hour period on the platform, messing up BitMEX’s ability to accurately “guess the current price by looking at the very recent past,” and the exchange’s BTC price briefly plummeted as a result.

Lucky for the broader crypto space, it was exclusive to BitMEX and the market only had a slight reaction before it all recovered. 

Cool, well, now ya know!