Bitcoin Price Reaches $6,700 After BitMEX’s Announced Maintenance

“Many people in the crypto space don’t see the link between the price of Bitcoin and recent announcements. However, a proof that there is a strong link was yesterday’s situation on the market and Bitcoin’s positive price movement.

The Bitcoin price has increased by more than 4% and rose from $6,400 to $6,700 within a short period of time. The increase, according to analysts, was because of the temporary downtime of BitMEX – which is a crypto exchange that is recognized for its margin trading system that allows users to trade Bitcoin and Ethereum with special leverage against the US dollar.

Since BitMEX was closed and investors could not log into the platform, many analysts stated that Bitcoin short contracts were liquidated and therefore pushed the price of the largest cryptocurrency to $6,700.

According to BitMEX, the resumption of the system was there for several minutes – after some users reported the difficulty logging in. As the exchange said on August 21st:

“Some users are reporting difficulty in logging in. We are diagnosing. We have postponed resumption of trading for 5 minutes to 01:35. We will report back shortly.”

This was followed by a new short update by BitMEX:

“Trading resumption deferred until login is stable. We will report back shortly. Login has stabilized. We encountered a large DDoS upon restarting web services. We will resume trading at 02:00 UTC (in 7 minutes).”

The BitMEX trading platform was then restored in a couple of hours, resuming its operation. However, there are many analysts who saw this as a market manipulation by large-scale retail traders who took advantage of the downtime of BitMEX during a period in which investors can no longer short the market – and that way drove up the price of Bitcoin.