Arca CIO Jeff Dorman Explains Bitcoin’s Nearly $10K Drop Over the Weekend

On Sunday (April 18), Jeff Dorman, who is the Chief Investment Officer (CIO) at NYSE Arca (which is “the top U.S. exchange for the listing and trading of exchange-traded funds”), gave three reasons for this past weekend’s Bitcoin price crash.

Data by TradingView indicates that — on crypto exchange Bitstamp — when the past weekend started (i.e. 00:00 UTC on April 17), Bitcoin was trading at $61,436. It got as high as $62,523 at 09:00 UTC on April 17. Then, at 03:35 UTC on Sunday (April 18), the Bitcoin price fell as flow as $51,541. By the end of the weekend, the Bitcoin price had recovered to $56,260.

Yesterday, the Arca CIO provided this short intelligent analysis of what happened in the Bitcoin markets over the weekend.

Now, let’s take a look at each statement in this tweet.

First, there was much confusion about the drop in the BTC hash rate (because of a blackout in one region of China) that we found out about on Friday (April 16).

On-chain analyst Willy Woo thought that the Bitcoin hash rate had dropped by 50%.

However, not everyone was convinced that the BTC hash rate had dropped this much. For instance, here is Blockstream CEO Adam Back replying to Woo and telling him that the drop in hash rate was probably around 20%.

However, not everyone believes that there is any causing relationship or even a correlation between the Bitcoin hash rate and the Bitcoin price. One of those people is Adam Cochran, a partner at venture fund Cinneamhain Ventures.

Second, there were various people claiming that high-level Coinbase executives had sold most of their Coinbase (NASDAQ: COIN) shares shortly after the start of trading of the shares on Nasdaq on April 14. For example, here is what gold bug and Bitcoin hater Peter Schiff said on April 18:

Earlier today (April 19), The Block’s research team shed some light on this topic, and showed that contrary to Schiff’s claim, the Coinbase CEO had sold less than 2% of his total holdings rather than 71%.

Third, around 02:42 UTC on Sunday (April 18), one Twitter account posted the following tweet that created much fear in the crypto markets:

Despite the tweet not coming from a well-known news outlet and essentially being not more than an unsubstantiated rumor, it was widely shared and created much fear in the crypto markets. Within one hour of the time this tweet was posted, the Bitcoin price on Bitstamp had dropped from a high of $59,231 (at 02:35 UTC on April 18) to a low of $51,541 one hour later.

One of Crypto Twitter’s favorite lawyers, Jake Chervinsky, who is the General Counsel at Compound, had this to say about this rumor yesterday:

And today, he said:

And finally, as Dorman points out, the weekend sell-off caused a huge amount of (long) liquidations, which is confirmed by data from Bybt.

Featured Image by “vjkombajn” via Pixabay.com

The views and opinions expressed by the author, or any people mentioned in this article, are for informational purposes only, and they do not constitute financial, investment, or other advice. Investing in or trading cryptoassets comes with a risk of financial loss.

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