The Bitcoin price, which recently exceeded the $ 11,000 mark, fell to less than $9,000 on Wednesday night on news of massive disruptions in the work of American crypto exchanges. This represented a drop by over 21% and more than $2000. Interestingly, at the beginning of the year, Bitcoin price was only half the value of the recorded quotation drop.
The day before, the work of the largest US Bitcoin exchange Coinbase was partially interrupted - some of the 12 million clients of the exchange could not enter their private account, while others noted a slow operation of the service, according to MarketWatch.
Dave Farmer, head of operations at Coinbase, said that the problems were caused by a massive influx of site visitors - on Wednesday, the webpage set a new record on traffic. The work was restored within 60 minutes.
“Coinbase is considered one of the most reliable exchanges, but it is young enough,” says Digital Asset Research analyst Matthew Gertler, “When you expand your infrastructure eight times in five months, you will inevitably run into problems.”
Also, there were problems on the trading platform GDAX, also owned by Coinbase. Gemini and Bitstamp had some issues.
According to Coindesk.com, Bitcoin recovered to $10,283. Recently, the cryptocurrency reached a record high at $11,427.
Earlier, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon said that Bitcoin was a fraud, while UBS analysts in their latest mailing to investors warned that Bitcoin might be a “speculative bubble.”
The cost of bitcoin rose sharply after the largest derivatives operator CME Group said that it would launch Bitcoin futures before the end of this year.
On Wednesday, the Wall Street Journal reported that Nasdaq and Cantor Fitzgerald are also considering opportunities to start trading Bitcoin futures.
The rise in the cost of Bitcoin is also associated with the spread of the so-called ICOs (Initial Coin Offering), in which start-ups create a new virtual coin or digital token and put it on open sale.
At the time of writing, Bitcoin Cash was traded at $ 1338.50, and Bitcoin Gold was at $285.54.