The price of bitcoin dropped as low as $3,700 before making a quick recovery to above $5,000. This was the worst day in the history of bitcoin since 2014 as the leading cryptocurrency lost nearly 50% in the space of 24-hours. Sam Bankman-Fried, CEO of research outfit Alameda and competitor exchange FTX in a series of tweets, claimed that BitMEX did not face any hardware issue on 12 March.
BitMEX went offline for around 25 minutes.
According to a tweet from the derivative exchange, Between 02:16 and 02:40 UTC 13 March 2020, the exchange suffered a hardware issue with its cloud service provider causing BitMEX requests to be delayed. The tweet further noted that the normal service resumed at 3:00 UTC. The exchange saw more liquidations than any other day over the past year, while aggregate volumes for Bitcoin futures also broke records.
Between 02:16 and 02:40 UTC 13 March 2020 we became aware of a hardware issue with our cloud service provider causing BitMEX requests to be delayed. Normal service resumed at 03:00 UTC. As a reminder, latest system updates can be found on our status page https://t.co/fVa1FAqSEW
— BitMEX (@BitMEXdotcom) March 13, 2020
The exchange rejects Sam Bankman-Fried’s “insane” conspiracy theory.
Sam Bankman-Fried, CEO of FTX, in a series of tweets, proposed a theory claiming that BitMEX never suffered a hardware issue. He further claimed that it was BitMEX’s unwillingness to address market conditions which hastened Bitcoin’s fall. He noted that bitcoin recovered after the platform went offline. The derivatives exchange responded to Sam calling the allegation a conspiracy theory. However, Sam later said that he “believed” BitMEX’s denial of his version of events
18) It's a pretty out there theory. But TBH I think I might believe it.
— SBF (@SBF_Alameda) March 13, 2020
