Home / Markets / Cryptocurrency / Bitcoin appears to crash 87% in a flash on Binance’s US venue Bitcoin appears to crash 87% in a flash on Binance’s US venue Premium Volume on the exchange in that minute was 592.8 Bitcoins, which are worth just shy of $40 million at current prevailing prices. (REUTERS) 1 min read . Updated: 21 Oct 2021, 09:54 PM IST Bloomberg The price of Bitcoin appeared to rapidly — and only temporarily — plunge about 87% on Binance’s U.S. exchange Thursday morning, sinking to as low as $8,200 from around $65,000. The price did nothing like that on other venues, and on Binance the level almost immediately snapped back to where it had been. The plunge occurred at 7:34 a.m. New York time, according to Binance’s website. Volume on the exchange in that minute was 592.8 Bitcoins, which are worth just shy of $40 million at current prevailing prices. Mistakes like this happen throughout finance when, for instance, traders mess up details of their intended trades, entering the wrong price or order size. An erroneously large trade, as one example, can overwhelm an exchange’s order book, leading to a quick and massive decline. The entire U.S. stock market famously flash crashed back in May 2010, though equities have mostly avoided trouble since that era. This is the latest in a string of recent high-profile trading problems in crypto. Synthetify, a new decentralized exchange, was forced to shut down for a while earlier this month shortly after its debut because of bad data provided by the Pyth Network, a price feed backed by some of the world’s most well-known trading and exchange firms. Pyth malfunctioned another time in September, erroneously making it appear that Bitcoin had crashed 90%.
Identifying the determinants of asset prices is one of the most important questions in finance. Traditional asset pricing theories are founded on the idea that equity prices should be determined by fundamentals such as earnings (Gordon 1959, Campbell and Shiller 1988). In contrast, the behavioral finance literature posits that prices do not always follow fundamentals due to investor sentiment trading (Shiller 1981, Baker and Wurgler 2006, Stambaugh et al. 2012). Eventually however, equity prices seem to trace their fundamentals (Pa´stor and Veronesi, 2003, 2006, Bartram and Grinblatt 2018).
