Monday Madness: Bitcoin crashes, most cryptos down


avatar Quebex Fintech Inc.
Jun 13, 2017

Bitcoin fell by roughly 12.5% today after topping $3,000 USD ($3,995 CAD) for the first time ever on Sunday; the price of a single coin is currently sitting at $3,582.56 CAD as of 5.30pm, ET, Monday, according to data from CoinDesk.

Prices fell dramatically at about 10am, UTC, sliding more than $400 CAD in a matter of minutes to hit a low of $3,530 CAD.

Today saw most other altcoins take big hits on price too with the notable exception of ethereum (ETH) which has continued its bullish run against the odds; it’s currently trading at $523.78 CAD, up 15% in 24 hours, according to coinmarketcap.

Some analysts have linked the recent pullback in cryptos to the fact that U.S. technology stocks fell for a second straight day on concerns that the sector has risen to unsustainable levels.

Others believe the crash was caused by outages on a couple of major bitcoin exchanges; Coinbase’s status site released the following statement at 2.08pm ET, Monday: "Coinbase is currently experiencing high traffic & customers have received a 'service unavailable' message when visiting Coinbase.com."



Additionally, BTC-e experienced what it believes was a distributed denial-of-service attack, tweeting the following at 2.06pm, UTC: “we are currently under ddos #btce.”





Coinbase accounts for almost 17% of USD-denominated bitcoin trading, according to Cryptocompare, with BTC-e accounting for 6%.

It’s unclear whether the two incidents were related in any way, though the fact that they happened almost simultaneously is sure to raise suspicion.

Despite Monday's correction, bitcoin is still up more than 150% this year; it first topped $2,000 USD on May 20, less than four weeks ago.