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%.
Yet tales of meme-coin holders becoming millionaires have attracted new waves of retail investors to crypto -- along with a growing number of nefarious players. In May, the Federal Trade Commission tallied a record number of crypto investment scams, with Americans’ losses totaling around $80 million since October.

So what should crypto investors do in light of this latest increase? Nothing, according to the experts we’ve talked to. Given the crypto’s history of volatility, this increase doesn’t guarantee a long-term reversal. Bitcoin’s price is just as likely to fall back down as it is to continue climbing. The price swings are going to keep happening, and experts say they’re something long-term crypto investors will have to continue dealing with.
It has a shorter blockchain creation time (one minute) and a vastly greater number of coins in circulation — the creators’ target of 100 billion units mined by July 2015 was met, and there’s a supply limit of 5.2 billion units mined every year thereafter, with no known supply limit.