Bitcoin Rallies as Bitmex Goes Down Causing Pain for Bitmex Shorts

On August 21st Bitmex had a scheduled outage, meanwhile BTC shorts were near a 2018 high. That setup was apparently too tempting for someone(s), as the market pumped like crazy the second Bitmex went down. The result was Bitcoin went from $6.4k to $6.9k.

To add insult to injury, upon restarting their servers, there was further delays before traders could manage positions, as Bitmex claimed it got hit with a DDos attack (see official Tweet).

The end result was a short squeeze, lots of liquidation and stops hit, some stop buys filled at high prices (like $7k; above where BTC traded on other exchanges), and general chaos on Bitmex (as far as I could tell from social media and such).

In other words, it was business as usual over at Bitmex, everyone’s favorite place to use a VPN to gamble away their Bitcoin and other cryptos on small price movements during the bear market. Half-joking.

Anyway, good news is that Bitmex is was back up and running within an hour from the outage. Bad news is that Bitcoin’s price came right back to where it was before the pump forming an epic and classic Bart.

This sort of drama reminds us why we should not be expecting the SEC to approve the Proshares ETF this week… but then again, the dissenting opinion on the Winklevoss rejection makes a strong case for why an ETF is needed more than ever. 🙂

NOTE: This isn’t the first Bitmex outage that has come with an epic pump or dump recently. Especially considering Bitmex is the highest volume exchange at the moment, this has caused some to come up with Bitmex conspiracy theories. To be fair to Bitmex however, it isn’t surprising that their increased popularity is putting a strain on their servers, and likewise the simple stupid reason for the increased popularity this year is: the market is bearish, no coins are running, that means no big money for anyone… unless they use high leverage… and you can use high leverage to short or long Bitcoin and other cryptos at Bitmex.