After falling by a historic 40% before recovering slightly yesterday, is today recouping some of its heavy losses, posting double-digit gains in the early hours of Friday trading.
Today’s rebound comes after the number one digital asset once again saw heavy selling around midnight UTC time, pushing it as low as USD 3,858 on before recovering. Other exchanges recorded overnight lows that differed slightly from that.
Counting from the overnight low, bitcoin has now rebounded by about 46%, although the asset is still far away from recovering yesterday’s heavy losses.
As pointed out by Nic Carter, Partner at Castle Island Ventures, a venture capital firm focused on public blockchains, yesterday’s loss marks the second-biggest one-day loss in bitcoin’s history. The only other time a bigger loss has been recorded was in the relatively early days of bitcoin in 2013, when the price dropped nearly 50% from USD 166 to 84 in a single day.
Further adding to the currently bearish sentiment is also a new statistic from crypto analysis firm Glassnode, which revealed that more than half of all circulating bitcoin is now held at a loss. This is the first time in over a year that this has taken place, Glassnode said.
More than half of the circulating #Bitcoin supply (~9.8M BTC) is now in loss.
— glassnode (@glassnode)
For – the second-most valuable digital asset by market capitalization – the situation was even worse as the asset dropped 43%, its worst one-day performance to date.
$200m+ in $ETH https://t.co/bTuRfJWkF9
— panek (@panekkkk)
In the aftermath of the crash, it also appears that the hunt is on for someone to blame for the misery, with some members of the community pointing fingers at the crypto derivatives BitMEX. Speculation on what ’s role during the crash was came after the exchange halted trading in the midst of the storm due to an alleged “hardware issue” at a cloud service provider.
The trading halt quickly became a topic of discussion among traders on Twitter and elsewhere, with some users proposing their own theories of what really happened. Among them was CEO of the crypto derivatives exchange FTX (co-owned by ) – one of BitMEX’s competitors – Sam Bankman-Fried, who appeared to doubt the official version of the story, sharing an "insane theory of the day: there was no BITMEX hardware issue."
