Well then… that bull run didn't last very long, did it?

In the early hours of today, the price of Bitcoin dropped from around $7,800 to $6,700 within just minutes on the BitMEX platform. Straight after that, the price of Ethereum followed suit as it sunk below the $200 mark.

The shocking drop of Bitcoin was more than likely triggered by the placement of a big sell order on Bitstamp and other big major crypto exchanges.

Stop run on stamp to trigger Bitmex liquidations. pic.twitter.com/RBmtjr88mT — Light (@LightCrypto) May 17, 2019

A developer at Gnosis, Eric Conner has said:

“For reference, someone put a 5,000 BTC sell on Bitstamp, which BitMEX uses for 50% of its feed and it appears to have tripped some algorithms which made a cascade on BitMEX.”

On top of this, on Twitter, he said:

“A whale crashes the entire crypto market 20% in 5 minutes with a single sell order on the books and people actually think an ETF is coming? 🤣”

Conner is indicating that one whale has manipulated the whole crypto market, which could have a knock-on effect for the chances of an ETF approval in the short-term.

Losing momentum

According to Joseph Young for CryptoSlate:

“The 5,000 BTC sell wall on Bitstamp that led to the sell-off of both bitcoin and Ethereum on BitMEX, led to a $30 billion drop in the valuation of the crypto market overnight.”

But even so, over the last week, the price of Bitcoin reached a new 2019 high around the $8,500 mark.

There are some analysts that have claimed that an overnight ten percent drop of most crypto assets could be evidence that the story of the viability of crypto is flawed.

Alex Kruger is one of these analysts who said: