Skip to main content

Bitcoin flash crashes by $2K in 5 minutes, liquidating $600M in longs

A flash crash on short timeframes for BTC/USD induces panic among long traders, but for analysts, it's business as usual.

Bitcoin (BTC) fell over $2,000 in five minutes on March 31 as a wave of volatility disrupted an otherwise calm market.

BTC/USD 1-minute candle chart (Bitstamp). Source: Tradingview

BTC sees sudden volatility

Cointelegraph Markets Pro and Tradingview showed a nightmare for long traders unfold on Wednesday, with BTC/USD suddenly dropping from $59,350 to $57,000.

At the time of writing, the losses were still mounting after the pair hit lows of $56,713 on Bitstamp. 

"Exactly Bitcoin," trader Michaël van de Poppe reacted to what has become a familiar event on short timeframes for Bitcoin.

Previously, upside had been the focus for day traders as news from PayPal spawned a run-up to just below $60,000.

Those betting on a continuation of the bull run lost big on Wednesday, however, as the downturn liquidated long positions worth $600 million amid a 24-hour total wipeout of $1 billion.

For quant analyst PlanB, their demise was nonetheless beneficial, helping to rid the market of unwanted leverage and ensure more organic future rises. As Cointelegraph reported, similar events have occurred with both long and short positions in recent months.

"Beautiful stop loss hunting .. again," he commented on Twitter.

"Now that all leveraged longs are liquidated, we finally have room for breaking $60K in April."

Funding rates creep up

Meanwhile, indicators showed reason to believe that further price increases for Bitcoin would need some work.

Funding rates across derivatives platforms were higher on the day, reaching as high as 0.375% on Huobi, a classic sign that downward pressure is incoming.

Bitcoin funding rates vs. BTC/USD chart. Source: Bybt

The longer-term picture remains more than positive, with analysts pointing to $68,000 and $73,000 as the next hurdles to watch.



from https://ift.tt/3djFG8s
https://ift.tt/3m8xjkb

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

DeFi isn’t dead, it just needs to fix these 3 critical problems

It’s been a rough year for DeFi, and it may not get any better until projects focus more on security, regulation and usability. The persistent challenges  decentralized finance  face have been well documented by a handful of analysts and the recent collapse of the Terra ecosystem re-enforced the fact that something is critically wrong with DeFi. I think DeFi today is completely broken for 99% of the population. The promise of a more transparent financial system has been overtaken by greed. UST/LUNA is just the latest in a string of bad developments: — Peter Yang (@petergyang) May 11, 2022 Let's take a look at what experts say DeFi needs to do in order to have another revival.  Improved usability To date, the promise of open and uncensored access to a global decentralized financial system has been largely hampered by the complicated interface, confusing multi-step staking processes and lack of clarity surrounding the yields on various tokens. What do you thi...

ENS DAO delegates offer perspective on DAO governance and decentralized identity

AlphaWallet CEO and Spruce co-founder talk about their roles as contributors to the Ethereum Name Service following the project's recent airdrop. Earlier this month, the Ethereum Name Service, or ENS, formed a decentralized autonomous organization, or DAO, for the ENS community.  Cointelegraph spoke to two ENS DAO delegates who applied for the opportunity to represent the community and stay involved in the decision making process: Victor Zhang, CEO of AlphaWallet, an open source Ethereum wallet, and Gregory Rocco, co-founder of Spruce, a decentralized ID and data toolkit for developers. Zhang spoke about his experience as an external contributor to ENS and an early supporter since 2018. Zhang initially sought to help ENS by offering Alpha Wallet as a user-friendly tool for  resolving .eth names and cryptocurrency wallet addresses. Essentially, if a user inputs an .eth name in the AlphaWallet, it will show the wallet address, and vice versa using reverse resolution. Alpha...

National Futures Association adds rules for members handling digital assets

The CFTC-linked self-regulatory organization (SRO) has disclosure rules for members engaging in activities with BTC and ETH; now, standards of conduct are being added. The National Futures Association (NFA), the United States self-regulatory organization for derivatives markets, has issued a new compliance rule addressing members’ conduct. The new rule complements requirements issued in 2018. The NFA has “well over 100” members that engage in activities with digital asset commodities, but no way to address fraud or misconduct committed by those members, the organization explained to secretary of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) Christopher Kirkpatrick in a Feb. 28 letter as it submitted the proposed new rule for approval. The new rule is modelled on the NFA’s antifraud rules for exchange traded futures and swaps transaction and retail foreign exchange. The NFA is the only registered self-regulatory organization that has delegated authority from the CFTC, giving it a...