Bitcoin Battles to Retake $13,000 Following Coinbase $1200 Blip

Bitcoin’s newfound habit of tearing at least $1000 every day on its way up, met some resistance on Wednesday, as everything looked all but set for the cryptocurrency to sell above $14,000.

Leading U.S cryptocurrency exchange, Coinbase announced on its status page at 1:47 p.m. PDT, that it had detected a bug on its website and API, a vulnerability that later resulted in the exchange’s website going offline for roughly thirty minutes.

Meanwhile, it was shortly before the Coinbase update that the price of the cryptocurrency started to dip, perhaps signaling a sell-off from users who feared that the worst might have happened to one of the industry’s finest trading venues. Binance had an ugly experience in recent times.

It could as well have been a sell-off from a user on the exchange’s OTC market, with whale alert noting a day earlier that a Bitcoin wallet had moved $101 million into Coinbase from an unknown exchange. That wallet address at press time had a balance less than $2000, suggesting a dump had taken place.

Whichever, the case, Bitcoin has not recovered from that ugly incident moving from then value of near $14,000 to roughly $12,261 at the time of writing this report. 

It is important to note at this point that several analysts had predicted a retracement given the fast way that Bitcoin had surged since the start of the week. 

With lots of retail investors now around the corner trying to grab some decent gains after a 2018 bear market, it is not unusual to see Bitcoin drop more than 20% in a day, since these set of investors can react to even the slightest dip

Another possible reason for a Bitcoin retracement could be formerly inactive wallets springing back to life after Bitcoin neared $13,900, noting a sell-off by investors after realizing at least half the value they had lost to the 2018 bear market.

Bitcoin, thus, now faces its stiffest test of the current bull market that many has touted to see it attain a new all-time high.