CEO of cryptocurrency derivatives exchange BitMEX Arthur Hayes said the community will certainly get their answers to questions about why the platform experienced several outages during the precipitous Bitcoin price downturn at the end of the last week.
‘I know there are questions and concerns following the events from the past 72 hours. We have been listening [the community] and my team has been gathering the facts. We will be addressing these questions and concerns transparently and comprehensively over the coming days,’ tweeted Arthur Hayes (@CryptoHayes) on Monday morning, March 16, 2020.
On the Friday night, March 13, multiple exchanges, including BitMEX, faced several issues occurred in the context of the market price drop for most cryptocurrencies.
Thus, BitMEX reported a ‘hardware issue with cloud service provider’ between 02:16 and 02:40 UTC. After a while, the platform normal service was resumed, but users still reported problems a few times during the day.
Besides, the sharp Bitcoin downfall provoked at BitMEX a large liquidation – within just a day, positions were liquidated for $1.1 billion in total. At the same time, the Insurance Fund remained almost unchanged, it lost only 1,627 MTC or 4.6% of the total reserves in these 24 hours. In contrast, the Insurance Fund assets value of another crypto derivatives exchange, Deribit, dropped from $3.1 million to $227,000. Let’s remind, according to analysts’ observations, institutional investors increased their short positions before the record Bitcoin collapse occurred in the last week.
