coindesk.com
Bitcoin's Tether-denominated price on BitMEX, represented by the XBT/USDT pair, crashed to $8,900 late Monday.
BitMEX said on X that it is investigating the large sell orders that caused the flash crash.
Yes, you read the title right. Late Monday, bitcoin suffered a brief crash to as low as $8,900 on cryptocurrency exchange BitMEX, while prices on other exchanges held well above $60,000.
The slide began at 22:40 UTC, and within two minutes, prices fell to $8,900, the lowest since early 2020, according to data from the charting platform TradingView. The recovery was equally quick, with prices rebounding to $67,000 by 22:50 UTC.
Throughout the boom-bust episode on BitMEX, BTC's global average price held steady at around $67,400.
Some observers on social media platform X allege that whale selling catalyzed the price crash. According to @syq, someone sold over 850 BTC ($55.49 million) on BitMEX, driving the XBT/USDT spot pair down to $8,900. The BitMEX XBT index tracks bitcoin's price. The XBT/USDT pair represents bitcoin's tether-denominated price. Tether is the world's leading dollar-pegged stablecoin.
Following the crash, BitMEX said on social media that it is looking into the large sell orders.
"We are investigating unusual activity in the past few hours involving a user selling large orders on our BTC-USDT Spot Market. This does not affect any of our derivative markets, nor the index price for our popular XBT derivatives contracts," BitMEX said on X, responding to @syq's post.
"The trading platform is operating as normal and all funds are safe," BitMEX added.
CoinDesk reached out to BitMEX for comment and did not receive a response by press time.