Bitcoin price spiked Tuesday evening rising from $6,450 to $6,900 instantly in an hour. The steep 5% surge happened just as Bitmex announced its scheduled maintenance.
Bitmex, a leveraged crypto exchange platform for Bitcoin and other digital currencies, announced that it is halting its services for scheduled maintenance. Insiders stated that the move caused some wild trading. The trading platform went down at 9 p.m. EST, precisely coinciding with the Bitcoin price hike. Prices subsequently eased back after increasing up to almost $7000.
Bitcoin rose by almost six per cent in this week; however, as for this month, the coin is down nearly ten per cent. Except one, all the top ten cryptocurrencies saw massive growth during the spike, each gaining about four to nine per cent.
Bitwise CEO Hunter Horsley said that the Bitmex shutdown created a golden opportunity for traders, as reported by Business Insider. “It is a silly short-term trade. Buy when maintenance starts. Sell when it ends,” he added.
According to Dave Weisberger, CEO of Coin Routes, “Bitfinex led it up to 6800+, but when GDAX caught up, their clients were paying over $100 too much when the other exchanges all fell back to 6700. There was a real arbitrage for a while when all this happened.”
Additionally, Crypto persona and Beastlorion, self-declared “crypto prophet” resorted to Twitter with a series of posts before the scheduled shutdown, and suggested that it would dramatically affect Bitcoin’s price.
Such price fluctuations were a common affair when Bitcoin was hiking up to $20,000 at the end of 2017. However, after that, the variations eased out gradually. In such circumstances, the traders can buy coins when the prices are low and sell them later at higher prices.
Bitmex is known to be a peer-to-peer platform for trading that offers buying and selling of leveraged contracts in Bitcoin. The official website reports a daily trade volume of $3.76 billion.
Bitmex’s recent tweet stated several times that users were experiencing problems with logging in after the maintenance had been completed. The company fixed the login glitches as per another post by them.
