Halving Nightmares: Bitcoin Price Tumbles Below $8000 Just Two Days Before The 2020 Halving Event

Bitcoin crashed 10% in 30 minutes, and almost 20% over the past hours, plunging below $8000 on some exchanges. Just two days before the anticipated Bitcoin halving event and no more than 48 hours after touching the $10K mark, a classic “sell the news” dump had initiated.

As of writing these lines, the Bitcoin price corrected a bit and currently trading above $8600, which is a 12% drop over the past 24 hours. The volatility had also affected the altcoins, whereas Ethereum saw a similar 12% drop, dipping below $200 to a current price of $186. The total market cap shrunk to $235 billion over the past few hours.

btcusd_5days_may10-min — BTC/USD over the past 5 days. Source: TradingView

$200 Million Long Liquidations On BitMEX

The volatility of Bitcoin has been accompanied by unprecedented liquidations on the leading derivates exchange, BitMEX. Data by Skew shows that roughly $200 million worth of long positions got liquidated over the short span of 25 minutes around 00:30 UTC, sending the price of Bitcoin down 15%.

Only two days ago, Bitcoin topped above $10,000, which carried an opposing liquidation of approximately $23 million worth of BitMEX short positions in under four hours.

Coinbase Lagging Under Pressure

Bitcoin’s recent price volatility seems to have caused a brief outage on popular U.S. crypto exchange Coinbase. The hashtag #Coinbase was trending on Twitter, with users screenshotting their 502 error message on their apps. Coinbase’s outages seem to have started at 5:26 PST, with most of the services restored by 6:14 PST.

Coinbase faced a similar outage last week when Bitcoin rallied 15% to $8,900. Other U.S. exchanges such as Kraken and Binance U.S. have remained operational during this time.

It remains to be seen whether the Bitcoin halving will trigger another sell-off. Popular analysts such as Willy Woo believe that after the halving event, the price trends will be influenced less by miners, which will cease to be the biggest sellers of Bitcoin. However, Woo expects exchanges to dump the price post halving.

From a technical point of view, the daily low around $8000 is also where the significant 200-days moving average line lies (the light green light on the following daily chart). Despite the plunge, Bitcoin started 2020 around $7,200 and still maintains almost 20% year to date.