After some no good, very bad days for Bitcoin that saw the world’s oldest and largest cryptocurrency sink below $62,000, BTC has come surging back.
BTC rose as high as $68,120.08 early Thursday morning. By mid-morning the Bitcoin price had settled to $66,828.32 after having gained 6% in the past 24 hours, according to CoinGecko data.
It’s still not quite level with its price from a week ago—but then it was this time last week that Bitcoin soared past $73,000 to set a new all-time high.
Crypto prices tanked at the start of the week, due in part to some “unusual activity” by a trader on crypto exchange BitMex. A series of large and repeated sell orders caused the BTC price to plummet as low $8,900 on BitMex’s spot exchange.
“However this incident had NO impact on our billion-dollar derivatives markets,” the exchange said in a statement released on X. “It did not move mark prices, and no liquidations were triggered by it because our indices are independent and battle-tested.”
“Bitcoin down to $8,900 on BitMEX?” Well, not quite the whole picture.
Yes, we are investigating potential misconduct by traders on our Bitcoin-USDT Spot market (👀Did you even know we offer Spot trading?)
However, this incident had NO impact on our billion-dollar derivatives… pic.twitter.com/qWXXnyQxjw
— BitMEX (@BitMEX) March 19, 2024
BitMex added that its compliance team is still investigating the accounts and transactions that triggered the 10-minute flash crash.
But the turnaround hasn’t shown up in spot Bitcoin ETF flows just yet.
Yesterday was the third day in a row that Bitcoin funds saw more withdrawals than deposits. Investors redeemed $261 million worth of Bitcoin ETF shares yesterday, bringing the week’s total net redemptions to $742 million, according to CoinGlass.
But viewed in isolation, the withdrawals from Grayscale Bitcoin Trust (GBTC) have been quite stark. Investors redeemed $387 million worth of GBTC shares yesterday, meaning the beleaguered fund has now seen a total of $1.5 billion worth of outflows this week.
The GBTC outflows—and continued deposits for BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT)—mean that the spot Bitcoin ETF category could have a new leader of the pack soon.
At the time of writing, IBIT has 238 thousand BTC compared to GBTC’s 361.6 BTC. If GBTC withdrawals and IBIT deposits were to continue at roughly the same rate they have, BlackRock could claim the top spot in early April.
