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.
BitMEX down again. Seems as though it's struggling to deal with volatility and a spike in volume.
It went down 1 minute before -0.375% funding rate. pic.twitter.com/6KLTTAYT66
— Oliver Knight (@OKnightCrypto) March 13, 2020
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.
$665 million bitcoin longs were liquidated just now on BitMEX alone, I repeat, $665 million
— Joseph Young (@iamjosephyoung) March 12, 2020
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.
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