Bitcoin plunges 7% in one hour to below $28,000 as ‘Mt. Gox Alert’ is causing confusion
Editor’s note: This story and its headline were updated after publication to clarify that Arkham’s ‘Mt. Gox alert’ was reported in error.
Bitcoin erased gains made earlier today, plunging as much as 7% in an hour to below $28,000, per CoinGecko data.
At the time of publication was the price of Bitcoin was just under $27,750, down 4.6% on the day and 8.4% over the past week.
The broader crypto market crashed alongside Bitcoin, with the top 10 coins by market cap down over the past hours and 24 hours, excluding stablecoins. Ethereum fell in tandem with Bitcoin to just under $1,830.
The news came on the heels of erroneous tweets from DB Newswire account on Twitter, which reported that blockchain analytics firm Arkham had sent an alert indicating wallets linked to defunct crypto exchange Mt. Gox and the US government had moved significant amounts of Bitcoin. Arkham boss Miguel Morel told Decrypt that the wallet movements were not connected, meaning that the United States was not necessarily the one moving or selling assets related to Mt. Gox.
About an hour later, Arkham posted on Twitter that the alert was actually misreported. “Today we fixed a bug related to Bitcoin notifications that caused us to no longer send notifications to a small subset of users’ private badges,” the company tweeted at the time. “This was one of them. This fix will not affect any additional users, and was not related to labels generated by Arkham.”
Representatives for the company did not immediately respond Decrypt’s requests for further comment at the time.
Then late Wednesday, the company revised its findings again.
“We have conducted an investigation into the DB Alert situation and determined that the Arkham Alerts were sent accurately in this case,” Arkham wrote. “DB set two alerts on all Bitcoin transactions over USD 10,000, with no counterparties set, then named the alerts ‘Mt Gox’ and ‘US Gov.’
The bug fix triggered previously configured notifications, and “no one received inaccurate notification.” In other words, DB mislabeled these wallets, which is what caused the confusion, according to Arkham.
The company went on to note that the alerts and attention on Twitter had nothing to do with the sudden drop in the price of Bitcoin.
“Neither the alert nor the tweet could have caused the sharp BTC price drop today, as the drop occurred between 19:17 and 20:01 UTC, and the alerts and tweet were sent after 20:07 UTC and 20:08 UTC respectively.”
