Arkham Intelligence claims that the timing of the BTC crash and its alert do not match.
On April 26th, Bitcoin (BTC) experienced a sharp 7% drop within an hour, plunging from $29,850 to $27,789.
Media outlets were quick to attribute the crash to blockchain analytics firm Arkham Intelligence which mistakenly sent alerts about Mt. Gox and the US government-linked wallets moving large amounts of BTC.
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Initially, Arkham tweeted that a "bug fix" had caused a false alert to be sent to a "small subset of users" on their analytics platform. Crypto news alert account DB or Tier10k, reacted swiftly to the message and informed its followers about the claims.
However, Arkham later tweeted a follow-up, stating that they had "conducted an investigation of the DB Alert situation, and determined that the Arkham alerts were sent accurately in this case.”
They argued that neither the alert nor the tweet could be responsible for the sudden drop in Bitcoin's price, as the decline happened between 19:17 and 20:01 UTC, while the alerts and subsequent tweet were sent at 20:07 UTC and 20:08 UTC, respectively.
Furthermore, Twitter user IT Tech shared data showing that no transfers had occurred from the wallets associated with Mt. Gox, indicating that Bitcoin's flash crash might have been caused by reasons unknown to market participants.
According to Blockchain.com data, a Bitcoin address associated with the US government's wallet for Silk Road hack funds did see a transaction on April 26th. However, it was a small $0.19 inbound transaction.
Despite the dramatic decline in Bitcoin's value, Arkham Intelligence maintains that their allegedly false alerts about Mt. Gox-related wallets were not the cause, leaving the actual reason for the crash yet to be determined.
At the time of writing, Bitcoin (BTC) retails for $29,051.32, recording a 2.01% increase in the last 24 hours.
