One of the more popular cryptocurrency exchanges, Bitfinex, has gone offline. The platform is undergoing unscheduled maintenance for reasons that have yet to be disclosed. Coincidentally or not, this happened on the day Bitcoin went on to lose around $2,000 of its value.
Bitfinex, the popular cryptocurrency exchange, has gone offline. There’s still no indication of the reasons for the outage, as the only thing that the exchange shared was that it’s undergoing unscheduled maintenance and that trading has been temporarily halted.
We are undergoing unscheduled maintenance with trading temporarily halted. All wallets remain unaffected and all traders will be kept informed of updates as and when they are available. Thank you for your patience.
— Bitfinex (@bitfinex) July 11, 2019
Naturally, this caused a wave of disappointment within the crypto community as many traders found they couldn’t place orders. The website itself is accessible, but users are alerted simply that the exchange is offline and that it will be back up shortly. This means that people don’t have access to their funds.
Interestingly enough, the timing of this unscheduled maintenance coincides with a serious short-term drop in the price of Bitcoin. In the past 24 hours, BTC has lost about $2,000 of its value. The cryptocurrency is currently down 10% on the day and is trading around $11,708.
But it wasn’t just Bitcoin. All the major altcoins took a beating, with some such as EOS recording tremendous losses of 20%. Bitcoin Cash (BCH) is down 17%, Litecoin is down 13% while Ripple’s XRP is down 14%. The second-largest cryptocurrency by market cap, Ethereum (ETH), is also down about 11.5% at the time of this writing.
It’s anyone’s guess whether or not Bitfinex’s downtime is in any way related to the sudden decline in the overall market. However, as the exchange failed to provide any clarification, the timing definitely seems questionable.
Moreover, we’ve witnessed firsthand that sudden maintenance periods on various exchanges could signal market manipulation as traders have no access to their funds or their trading accounts.
It’s also worth noting that Bitfinex is closely associated with Tether, the issuer of the popular stablecoin USDT, which has long been under the microscope when it comes to Bitcoin price manipulation.
