Bitfinex Offline: Goes In Unscheduled Maintenance On The Day Bitcoin Crashes $2,000
One of the popular cryptocurrency exchanges, Bitfinex, has gone offline. The venue is going through unscheduled maintenance and the reasons for it are yet to be disclosed. Coincidentally or not, this happened on the day Bitcoin went on to lose around $2,000 of its value.
Bitfinex Is Offline: Unscheduled Maintenance
The popular cryptocurrency exchange Bitfinex has gone offline. There’s still no disclosure as per the reasons for the outage as the only thing that the exchange shared is that it’s unscheduled maintenance and that trading will be temporarily halted.
We are undergoing unscheduled maintenance with trading temporarily halted. All wallets remain unaffected and all traders will be kept informed of updates as and when they are available. Thank you for your patience.
— Bitfinex (@bitfinex) July 11, 2019
Naturally, this caused a wave of disappointment within the community as many traders were eager to place certain orders but couldn’t. The website itself is accessible but users get notified that the exchange is offline and that it will be back up shortly, without disclosing any further information. This means that people don’t have access to their funds.
Questionable Timing: Bitcoin Drops $2,000
Interestingly enough, the timing of this unscheduled maintenance coincides with a serious short-term drop in the price of Bitcoin. In the past 24 hours, BTC lost about $2,000 of its value. The cryptocurrency is currently 10% down on the day and it is trading at around $11,708.
But it wasn’t only Bitcoin. All of the major altcoins took a beating with some of them such as EOS recording tremendous losses of 20% on the daily charts. Bitcoin Cash (BCH) is down 17%, Litecoin is down 13% while Ripple (XRP) is down 14%. The second-largest cryptocurrency, Ethereum (ETH) is also down about 11.5% at the time of this writing.
It’s anyone’s guess whether or not Bitfinex downtime is in any way related to the sudden drop in the entire market. However, as the exchange failed to provide any clarifications, the timing definitely seems questionable.
Moreover, we’ve witnessed first hand that sudden maintenance periods for different exchanges could signal for market manipulation as traders have no access to their funds and to their trading accounts.
It’s also worth noting that Bitfinex is closely associated with Tether – the issuer of the popular stablecoin USDT, which is long under the crosshair when it comes to Bitcoin price manipulation.
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