Elon Musk drives Bitcoin price up, gets crypto exchanges into trouble
No time right now?
After Elon Musk added the hashtag Bitcoin to his Twitter profile on Friday, the currency jumped $ 6,000. Other coins followed and got the exchanges in trouble.
Basically, Elon Musk hadn’t done much. It was enough to add the word Bitcoin to his profile to trigger a spectacular rise in the currency of 20 percent to over 38,200 dollars within minutes. Other coins also won in the course of this upgrade.
It didn’t take more to drive the Bitcoin. (Screenshot: t3n / Twitter)
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Again failures in crypto exchanges
The spontaneously rising values ​​apparently put the crypto marketplaces Kraken and Coinbase under so much pressure that they had to suspend trading. At Coinbase this probably only affected transactions based on US dollars, at Kraken it applied to all trading. However, both rushed to officially blame technical problems for the failure. Trading is now back on both exchanges.
At Kraken, the trading API of the exchange had already failed on Thursday. The web interface could still be used. Even now, octopuses still plague “intermittent connectivity problems”.
Both exchanges had suspended trading when Bitcoin first exceeded the $ 39,000 mark a few weeks ago. Since then, they have repeatedly struggled with alleged failures.
It could be a liquidity crisis where the exchanges don’t have enough supply to fulfill demand.
– Pomp 🌪 (@APompliano) January 29, 2021
Technical problems or not enough volume to meet demand?
The crypto expert Anthony Pompliano apparently considers technical downtimes to be unlikely, as he indicated on Twitter. Rather, he assumes that liquidity problems are behind the dropouts. According to this theory, the exchanges would not have enough volume to meet the increasing interest and would have to respond with a trading stop. The market valuation of Bitcoin is now at a total of $ 1.05 trillion after the recent increase.
The crypto exchange Bittrex also had to stop trading – according to their own information – restrict for technical reasons. At Bittrex, however, the restriction only affected the Dogecoin, which had also had a real price rally in the past few days. The exchange took the corresponding wallet from the website and mobile app. At the time this article appears, Dogecoin are fully tradable again.
