Bitcoin ‘crashes’ exchanges reaching $64,000

The price of bitcoin experienced massive volatility on Wednesday, soaring to nearly 64,000 dollars before plunging back to 60,500 dollars within an hour. Amid the chaos, crypto traders faced 638 million dollars in liquidations over the past 24 hours. According to Coinglass, around 55 million dollars in liquidations were recorded in the altcoin market within an hour after the big jump, while 96 million dollars was liquidated directly on bitcoin.

Meanwhile, ethereum traders suffered 45 million dollars in liquidations, and dogecoin traders lost 29 million dollars. In the last 24 hours, 168,988 traders were liquidated. The largest single liquidation occurred on OKX in the BTC-USDT pair for 9.45 million dollars.

Given the current growth rate and significant institutional demand, bitcoin could reach its peak of 69,000 dollars in a few days. Historically, bitcoin has never exceeded its previous peak before a halving. However, the apparent high demand coupled with scarce supply is causing a massive price surge, making new highs seem inevitable. BlackRock’s Bitcoin ETF, the largest of all newcomers, now holds over 9 billion dollars in bitcoin and absorbed a record 520 million in net inflows on Tuesday, and 612 million dollars on Wednesday.

Coinbase caused panic

The surge in bitcoin’s price, and consequently the increase in traffic, caused technical difficulties at the cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase yesterday, leading some users to see a zero balance on their accounts. Additionally, several users of this exchange experienced an unpleasant surprise after logging into the app and seeing that their account balance showed zero funds. The issue caused panic and confusion, with some believing that they had been hacked and their funds stolen.

However, Coinbase responded to the issue, stating that user funds are safe. According to the company’s CEO Brian Armstrong on X, the outage the app faced was a result of a significant increase in traffic. In a series of status updates on the Coinbase website, the company acknowledged the zero balance issue, adding that there were also problems with buying and selling. The company further reported improvements in user trading, although it stated that increased traffic could still cause errors in receipts and some payment methods for certain clients.

The latest update shows that activity on the platform is normal, and the platform will continue to actively monitor systems and provide updates. Meanwhile, Armstrong stated in a subsequent tweet that the Coinbase app is ‘recovering’, noting that the company tested ‘ten times the traffic’, but observed that the current situation exceeded the exchange’s expectations.

While it seems that the operation of the Coinbase app is returning to normal, the crypto community did not miss the opportunity to point out that the platform has always experienced outages whenever there was a surge in bitcoin’s price. Besides Coinbase, other major crypto exchanges like Binance are also known to face technical issues amid market surges.