As the Largest Crypto Exchange Goes Offline, Bitcoin and Altcoins Fall to Monthly Lows

The cryptocurrency markets lost around $25 billion today, as Bitcoin and all major large-cap altcoins plummeted in value. This happened right after Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, went down for scheduled maintenance. 

Markets Plunge 

The last 24 hours were particularly damaging for the cryptocurrency markets, as Bitcoin and all major altcoins saw significant declines. 

Bitcoin, for one, broke below the $10,000 level and has plunged 7% at the time of this writing. The cryptocurrency is now trading at around $9,830.

All major altcoins are also bleeding, and most of them are seeing double-digit declines. The biggest loser among the top 10 cryptos is EOS, which is down 13%, followed by Bitcoin Cash and Ethereum, all of which fell by upwards of 12%. 

Alts have declined significantly less in BTC terms, though. Binance Coin (BNB) has managed to stay afloat and even marked a slight increase of about 1.5% against BTC, despite being down 7% against the dollar. 

The crypto market as a whole lost around $25 billion of its value, though Bitcoin’s dominance rate gained around 1%.

Awkward Timing Once Again

All of this happened after Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, went offline for scheduled maintenance in order to perform major system updates. 

According to the announcement, some of those updates include optimizations of the matching engine, API, and WebSocket. More interestingly, Binance is set to introduce a new order type called OCO (One Cancels The Other). 

The maintenance was intended to last for 6-8 hours, which is a considerable amount of time during which deposits, withdrawals, and trading was halted. 

As CryptoPotato has reported in the past, scheduled maintenance provides an excellent opportunity for whales to manipulate the Bitcoin price. Traders don’t want to be out of control only to experience forced liquidation when the exchange goes back online. 

Moreover, significant arbitrage is also made possible due to the large difference in prices before and after an exchange goes offline.