Mooners and Shakers: Bitcoin hits $30k, then plunges 7pc on Mt Gox false alarm… then pumps again

Coinhead Rob Badman
Bitcoin Mt Gox

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It’s been a crazy, bumpy old ride in crypto over the past 12 hours or so. If you were after gut-churning volatility with your risk-asset investment portfolio, Bitcoin and co obliged last night (AEST).

BTC took a nice surge up from about the US$28.3k range to around US$30k, only to dump heavily below US$28k again in less than an hour – about a 7% plunge.

What happened? Arkham did. Not the fictional Gotham City hospital that houses the criminally insane, a blockchain analytics firm that evidently sent out a tweet (in error according to reports) that spread some alarming information. Misinformation, as it turns out. Or was it? It’s actually an evolving and slightly confusing situation, this.

The now-deleted tweet, as reported by crypto media outlet Decrypt, had noted that crypto wallets linked to the long-defunct exchange Mt. Gox, along with crypto wallets in possession of the US government, had moved a large amount of Bitcoin. The implication being an impending dump of those particular BTC tokens on the market.

It didn’t play out exactly like that, but the market dumped anyway, purely on fears around the news.

About an hour later, Arkham Intelligence sent out this tweet, clarifying that the information was sent out in error due to a “bug related to Bitcoin alerts” in its Twitter set-up.

Okay, bummer. Right then, where’s the “phew, false alarm pump” to US$60k?

Hang on a sec, news just in – Arkham now claims that the alerts were “sent accurately”? And that:

“No one received inaccurate alerts, they simply began receiving the alerts they had previously set.”

“Neither the alert nor the tweet could have caused the sharp BTC price drop today,” added Arkham, noting that the BTC dump occurred between 19:17 and 20:01 UTC, and the alerts and its following tweet were sent after those times.

It’s tough work making sense of that full tweet, but the upshot, we believe, is that a sell-off of Bitcoin related to Mt. Gox asset holders and the US government’s large haul of seized Silk Road-era BTC, is a false alarm for now.

That’s not to say that selling events related to these two factors won’t occur in the fairly near future. The Biden government has stated it plans to liquidate more than 41,000 of the BTC it holds in four batches over the course of this year. At least it won’t all dump at the one time.

The Mt. Gox Bitcoin payout to creditors (worth in total 142,000 BTC) is also being staggered, with it all due to be settled by the end of October this year. And that’s not to say that all creditors will simply just sell their newly regained Bitcoin, mind.

 

Top 10 overview

With the overall crypto market cap at US$1.26 trillion, up about 2.3% since this time yesterday, here’s the current state of play among top 10 tokens – according to CoinGecko.

And speaking of upshots, when we were first about to publish this article, the crypto market had pretty much levelled out to where it was this time yesterday, despite the BTC surge and purge… but, in the past 10 minutes, the no.1 crypto asset has just pumped again above US$29k.

You didn’t come here for pleasant, serene sailing, presumably.

 

Uppers and downers

Some of the biggest 24-hour gainers and losers at press time. (Stats accurate at time of publishing, based on CoinGecko.com data.)

PUMPERS (11-100 market cap position)

• Kaspa (KAS), (market cap: US$569 million) +18%

• Render (RNDR), (market cap: US$834 million) +16%

• MultiversX (EGLD), (market cap: US$1.06 billion) +12%

• Casper Network (CSPR), (market cap: US$599 million) +8%

• Injective (INJ), (market cap: US$674 million) +6%

 

PUMPERS (lower caps)

• Step App (FITFI), (market cap: US$13.5 million) +25%

• Pendle (PENDLE), (market cap: US$46 million) +12%

• QuickSwap (QUICK), (market cap: US$36 million) +11%

 

SLUMPERS

• Pancake Swap (CAKE), (market cap: US$513 million) -4%

• Algorand (ALGO), (mc: US$1.3 billion) -2%

• NEAR protocol (NEAR), (mc: US$1.69 billion) -2%

• Fantom (FTM), (mc: US$1.17 billion) -1.5%

• Chainlink (LINK), (mc: US$3.64 billion) -1.5%

 

Around the blocks

Some pertinence and randomness that stuck with us on our morning moves through the Crypto Twitterverse.

Meanwhile, fancy some AI-generated pizza… from, er. “Pepperoni Hug Spot”?

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