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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!
