Bitcoin fell 87% to $ 8,200 on Thursday morning, but only on the Binance US trading platform. On other sites, the cryptocurrency did nothing of the kind.
Binance explained that one of its institutional traders encountered a bug in their trading algorithm, and this is what caused the sell-off. "We are continuing to look into the event, but understand from the trader that they have now fixed their bug and that the issue appears to have been resolved," the company said.
The trading volume on the exchange at that moment was 592.8 bitcoins, which at current prevailing prices is only $ 40 million.
Such mistakes occur in the financial area when traders misrepresent the details of their intended trades by entering the wrong price or order size. For example, an erroneously large trade can overwhelm the exchange's order book, leading to a rapid and massive drop.
The entire US stock market crashed in May 2010, although stock problems have largely been avoided since then.