The Bitcoin market witnessed a strong blow as the BitMEX’s co-founders were charged with money laundering violations among other charges by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission [CFTC]. While in a separate indictment, the U.S. Attorney filed a criminal action against its owners Arthur Hayes, Ben Delo, and Samuel Reed. Although the owners maintained their stance of no wrong-doing, the market saw a panic movement.
According to data provider Glassnode, there were nearly 170,000 BTC [~ $1.8 billion] held in BitMEX wallets, and more than 32,200 BTC were withdrawn from the exchange’s addresses within a single hour. This was equivalent to nearly 19% of all Bitcoins in their vault.
Source: Glassnode
This was noted to be the largest BTC outflow from the exchange so far. However, some users suggested that the exchange was buying Bitcoin and not selling to secure their funds since the dollar was easier to seize than the digital asset.
In the meantime, nearly $19 million longs were liquidated on BitMEX since yesterday and the liquidation was still on, at press time.
Source: Skew
As BTC left the BitMEX exchange the impact of it was felt in the futures market as the derivatives exchange lost over $100 million in Open Interest [OI], with the value of BTC currently resting at $10,474.31.
Source: Skew
The falling interest and liquidations pushed BitMEX to the fourth position in terms of BTC futures volumes on the platform. It was reporting a 24-hour volume of $1.89 billion, after Binance, OKEx, and Huobi that were noting a volume above $2.5 billion, at the time of writing.
The impact of the news was not limited to just the Bitcoin market. The altcoins were also crumbling due to the sudden fall in BTC price and the panic in the market. Ethereum, the second-largest crypto also witnessed a fall of nearly 9% until now and was being traded at $340.22. While the ETH longs worth $642k were liquidated on BitMEX. The exchange was in the fourth position in terms of 24h ETH Futures volume with $334.8 million.
