BitMEX suffers outages as Bitcoin volatility spikes

Volatility on Bitcoin trading pairs has spiked to an alarming rate with a number of top exchanges struggling to cope with the fluctuations and surge in trade volume.

BitMEX has particularly struggled after facilitating more than $10 billion in trades over the past 24-hours.

According to an official update, BitMEX went down for 44 minutes during the early hours of this morning, with price preceding to rise staggeringly in the seven minutes after it came back online.

It then suffered an outage again at 11:58 UTC, which lasted for around 15 minutes.

The second outage came just moments before the funding rate was to pay long positions at a rate of 0.375%, prompting concern from traders on social media.

Over the past 24-hours Bitcoin has fluctuated wildly between $6,000 and $3,500, with the occasional one minute candles moving by more than $1,000.

This has caused a cascade in liquidations on exchanges like BitMEX, where users often trade with high leverage to try and capitalise on price action.

More than $665 million in long positions were liquidated on BitMEX during Thursday’s dramatic day of trading, making it one of the most severe days in the history of Bitcoin.

As coronavirus tightens its grip over global capital markets and alternative markets like cryptocurrencies, an increase in volatility is expected as traders begin to lose trust in so-called ‘safe haven’ assets.

For more news, guides and cryptocurrency analysis, click here

Bitcoin pricing

Current live BTC pricing information and interactive charts are available on our site 24 hours a day. The ticker bar at the bottom of every page on our site has the latest Bitcoin price. Pricing is also available in a range of different currency equivalents:

US Dollar – BTCtoUSD

British Pound Sterling – BTCtoGBP

Japanese Yen – BTCtoJPY

Euro – BTCtoEUR

Australian Dollar – BTCtoAUD

Russian Rouble – BTCtoRUB

About Bitcoin

In August 2008, the domain name bitcoin.org was registered. On 31st October 2008, a paper was published called “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System”. This was authored by Satoshi Nakamoto, the inventor of Bitcoin. To date, no one knows who this person, or people, are.

The paper outlined a method of using a P2P network for electronic transactions without “relying on trust”. On January 3 2009, the Bitcoin network came into existence. Nakamoto mined block number “0” (or the “genesis block”), which had a reward of 50 Bitcoins.

More BTC news and information

If you want to find out more information about Bitcoin or cryptocurrencies in general, then use the search box at the top of this page. Here’s an article to get you started.

As with any investment, it pays to do some homework before you part with your money. The prices of cryptocurrencies are volatile and go up and down quickly. This page is not recommending a particular currency or whether you should invest or not.

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by the author should not be considered as financial advice.