- Crypto exchanges suffered a torrid day as the crypto markets crashed
- Binance and FTX froze again while some Kraken users were liquidated as ETH and ADA crashed 60%
- The crypto market took a $330 billion hit as Bitcoin fell twice
Crypto exchanges suffered more outages as the crypto market took a $330 billion hit following a double correction from Bitcoin. Binance, FTX, and especially Kraken had another bad day at the office as their services went down at crucial times, with Kraken users in particular having a bad day as the price of Ethereum flash crashed to $700 on the platform. This liquidated anyone with even the most conservative stop loss, adding to the hundreds of millions of liquidations across the platforms.
Crypto Market Battered as Bitcon Leads the Correction
The crypto markets endured a terrible start to the week as the long-anticipated correction finally hit. $330 billion was wiped from the total market cap as Bitcoin dropped from $58,350 to $47,400, taking the rest of the market with it. It looked to be out of the woods when it rebounded to $54,865, but it failed to sustain this and dropped again to $48,615 and further losses cannot be discounted.
The crash once more caused crypto exchanges to suffer outages, with Binance and FTX users experiencing price freezes and an inability to place orders, while Kraken traders had it even worse as several alts, including ETH and ADA, flash crashed by 60%, unfairly liquidating anyone who had a stop loss:
Kraken Acknowledges Error But Declines to Act
Kraken acknowledged the error and advised anyone with “questions about their account” to raise a support ticket. This didn’t bode well for those who got unfairly liquidated, with a further conversation between CEO Jesse Powell and a user suggesting that customers would just have to suck up any losses they endured:
Who made money? You’re suggesting that we unwind trades? How would you determine who should have their trades reversed?
— Jesse Powell (@jespow) February 22, 2021
Other popular crypto exchanges such as Binance and FTX were also down at crucial times during the crash, but the platforms themselves failed to acknowledge it, leaving customers to report the problems:
Okay now I’m finally done with @binance
Wanted to manually close my short at 48k
Now we are back at 52k and i could neither close my short or open a longFU 🖕
— silver bullet (@SilverBulletBTC) February 22, 2021
ftx was down too come on
— fafafofo (@fafaf0f0) February 22, 2021
Outages at crucial times have been plaguing the crypto space for months as the popularity of cryptocurrency trading has soared, with exchanges unable to properly scale to meet demand (sounds familiar doesn’t it?). This is despite exchanges raking in billions thanks to a massive influx of customers in recent months, and unless they put more of these resources into their platforms the frustration will cause users to abandon them, or the space entirely.
