Today at 1:20 PM CEST the price of bitcoin suddenly dropped to $11,200.
Until late in the morning it had remained around $11,700, but from about 12:30 PM it started to fall, with two small flash crashes.
The first occurred at 1:10 PM and brought the price down to $11,300, while the second occurred at 1:20 PM and brought it down to $11,200.
After that, the price bounced back to around $11,400.
Exactly at 1:21 PM CEST, Binance published a tweet saying:
“We are aware of some temporary difficulties accessing Binance.com.
Rest assured our team is working on it.
Thank you for your patience and apologies for any inconvenience caused”.
The coincidence between the two events is hardly accidental.
First of all, at 1:21 PM, Binance states that it is already aware of previous difficulties in accessing the site.
It is therefore conceivable that these difficulties started earlier, perhaps around 1:10 PM.
Furthermore, the second small flash crash seems to have occurred at the same time as Binance’s tweet.
At 1:58 PM the CEO of Binance CZ always wrote on Twitter:
“From our monitoring, all services should be back to normal now. Still observing”.
At 2:06 PM there was a momentary peak in purchases that brought the price of bitcoin back close to $11,500.
The overlaps are too many to say that it was just a coincidence, so it would seem that today’s double small flash crash resulted from problems on Binance, which were promptly resolved.
It should be remembered that Binance is by far one of the most important crypto exchanges in the world, with trading volumes of about ten billion dollars a day making it the crypto exchange with the highest spot volumes at the moment.
It is therefore more than plausible that any concerns about its operation may adversely affect the value of the crypto market. In fact, today the drop has not only occurred on bitcoin but also on all cryptocurrencies.
In May 2019, Binance suffered a hacker attack involving the theft of funds, so the above fears may not be totally unjustified.
