Cryptocurrency analytics firm CoinMetrics has found new evidence that the significant upward price movement in Bitcoin that took place on April 2nd this year was the work of a single trader, whom the firm referred to as a “committed actor.”
The trader, whose identity is unknown, executed a number of large trades across multiple exchanges at times when Liquidity is lowest. CoinMetrics said that this was done to have the largest possible impact on prices: “although this cannot be known for sure, such trades would have been designed to trigger stop losses and force a short squeeze through liquidations of margin positions and short futures positions,” the firm said.
Our theory is that a single committed actor went long and traded in a manner that maximized price impact. The movement in price started at 04:30 UTC time, the point in the day where global liquidity is at a minimum.
— CoinMetrics.io (@coinmetrics) April 17, 2019
Regardless of the reason, the trades began at 04.30 UTC and continued for roughly one hour. While a number of other reports that observed the trading activity around this time have claimed that the trades initially took place on Coinbase, Bitstamp, and Kraken, CoinMetrics says that the trades actually started on HitBTC. However, CoinMetrics acknowledged that “we cannot rule out wash trading at HitBTC.”
The large price movement on April 2, 2019 occurred during the window of lowest global liquidity. It began at 04:30 UTC and lasted until 05:30 UTC. This time may have been deliberately chosen so that a committed actor could maximize price impact when trading. pic.twitter.com/vktxpGBwlQ
— CoinMetrics.io (@coinmetrics) April 17, 2019
The Beginning of a Bull Market?
CoinMetrics also said that while this hour-long series of trades may have reignited the Bitcoin bull market, Bitcoin’s price is also being driven up by Bitcoin’s upcoming ‘halving.’
‘Halving’ literally means that block rewards for Bitcoin miners will be cut in half. This has occurred twice so far in Bitcoin’s history – once in 2012 and once in 2016. Both times, a months-long price rally preceded the halving. The next halving is set to occur in May 2020.
Today we'll cover some metrics relating to Bitcoin's miner economics and its long term cycles pic.twitter.com/008Icmy2gi
— CoinMetrics.io (@coinmetrics) April 15, 2019
CoinMetrics claims that this time, Bitcoin could rise over $20,000--but for some, there’s still a long way to go before we can really call the recent upward price movement a true “rally.”
“If we break 8k, we can say the bullish sentiment is back and we are on our way to all-time high,” wrote Gabriel Dusil, Co-Founder and General Manager at Blockchain technology incubator Adel, in a recent email to Finance Magnates. “At the 12k area, we could see the start of FOMO (fear of missing out) that could bring new speculators in, and with fresh capital in crypto, we could see the prices surpassing the 2017 heights.”
