On Saturday, Coinbase experienced a brief outage as the price of Bitcoin (BTC) experienced a flash crash of 10% in just 30 minutes. After a healthy rally during the week, BTC plummeted from $9,500 to $8,100 Saturday evening. According to the major exchange's status page, its website, mobile app, and API all experienced partial outages beginning at 17:26 Pacific time. Service was restored for the San Francisco-based firm's consumer and institutional trading sites in an hour. On Saturday, a spokesperson for Coinbase declined to comment on the status page and asserted the exchange is monitoring the situation. Cryptocurrency exchanges like Coinbase have a long history of suffering temporary outages during periods of extreme price volatility.
Here is the rest of the week in review:
Paul Tudor Jones II, a pioneer of the hedge fund, is prepared to bet bullishly on Bitcoin's price as an inflation hedge. According to an investor note, Jones' $22 billion Tudor BVI Global Fund, was recently authorized to hold as much as "a low single-digit percentage exposure percentage" of its assets in BTC futures. In the letter, Jones said Bitcoin reminds Jones of gold in the 1970s. He argues that through the early 1970s, gold experienced an acute rally from $35 per ounce in 1971 to a peak of $180 in late 1974, citing unprecedented central bank monetary policy amid the coronavirus crisis as a primary reason for the interest in BTC. Jones said: "I am not a hard-money nor a crypto nut." He also posted a subjective ranking of assets by their ability to store value and gave BTC 43, a worse score than gold, cash, and equities. But Jones also considers the upcoming digitalization of currency as a bullish argument for Bitcoin.
Telegram promised to turn over communications, bank records, and other information to the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) as part of the regulator's ongoing legal fight against the communications firm over allegations its $1.7 billion token sale in 2018 violated federal securities law. According to a court filing on Friday, Telegram agreed to hand over certain documents to the SEC as part of discovery. The firm will also answer questions about bank records that were already divulged. The filing says Telegram shall give the SEC notice of any changes to its investment agreements as well. The firm will also hand over its communications about the termination of its private placement contracts by May 20.
Crypto prices slipped this week to $239 billion due to the weekend crash. For the majors, all slipped into the red, and EOS, Litecoin (LTC), and Bitcoin SV (BSV) posted outsized double-digit losses. In the top 100, the biggest losers were Quant (QNT), down 16%, EOS, down 15%, and Ethereum Classic (ETC), down 14%. The biggest gainers were Crypterium (CRPT), up a whopping 97%, 0x (ZRX), up 89%, and ABBC Coin (ABBC), up 75%. Next week traders will see if crypto can bounce back from the flash crash.
The author owns a small amount of BTC and LTC.