Bitcoin price volatility has reared its head again on Wednesday after ET following a rally to new year-to-date highs. The price of the flagship cryptocurrency rose to $13,880 on the Luxemburg cryptocurrency exchange Bitstamp only to flash crash to $11,794 a few minutes after losing more than $2,000 in a span of fewer than 30 minutes.
In an attempt to salvage their portfolio, several investors on the Coinbase platform, a leading US-based cryptocurrency exchange flocked to the website causing a temporary outage at approximately 1:45 p.m. PDT. Users who visited the website were greeted with the blue screen with an automated error message stating “AN ERROR HAS OCCURRED.”
The outage reportedly affected the entire Coinbase interfaces including the website, its mobile application interfaces as well as API. The outage was, however, fixed fast as a few hours later the popular trading platform announced through its status page that “A fix has been implemented and we are monitoring the results.” That was about 5:17 pm ET. So far the platform has not experienced any issues after the Wednesday afternoon mishap. Similarly, trading platform Robinhood also reported through its status page that it was experiencing issues around the same time that Bitcoin price plummeted.
Bitcoin has continued its parabolic price rise over this quarter gaining more than 240% since the start of April on Bitstamp. The coin has blasted through several resistance levels without batting the eye including the highly anticipated $10,000 psychological resistance which was also breached definitively over the past weekend.
The next resistance level that was at around $13,500 was also breached in its latest rally just before the brutal correction, from which the price has since rebounded to the higher $12K figures as of press time.
Despite its $2K flash crash, the coin is still up about 8% according to Coinmarketcap still leading the overall cryptocurrency. Only Chainlink is currently registering more gains in the last 24 hours following its listing in the popular Coinbase exchange.
The token is up more than 17% against a sea of red. Most altcoins are undergoing massive capitulation as they follow Bitcoin’s fall as they are posting losses of about 4-8%. Ethereum, the leading altcoin has, rather impressively, recovered from a minor retrace also trailing Bitcoin’s price action and is in the green as of press time with gains of about 5% over the same time period.
