A flash-crash triggered a sharp drop in Bitcoin’s value on the Binance.US trading platform, causing an abrupt 87% devaluation in the price of the leading crypto asset.
On October 21st, the price of Bitcoin briefly tumbled to a low of $8,200 from $65,952 on Binance.US, the arm of global crypto exchange Binance in the United States. Within five minutes, the value of the crypto surged back up to $65,000, negating all the losses from the massive sell-off.
In an email to Bloomberg, Binance explains the root cause of the flash-crash event.
“One of our institutional traders indicated to us that they had a bug in their trading algorithm, which appears to have caused the sell-off.
We are continuing to look into the event, but understand from the trader that they have now fixed their bug and that the issue appears to have been resolved.”
Data from Binance.US shows that over 594 BTC exchanged hands during the crash, worth over $36 million at time of writing.
The price of Bitcoin did not suddenly nosedive on other cryptocurrency exchange platforms that day, according to Bloomberg.
Bitcoin is currently trading at $60,849, a 9.3% decrease from its seven-day high of $67,118, according to CoinGecko.
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