Crypto markets experienced a short spurt of energy a few hours ago when a seemingly manipulated pump added over $12 billion to total capitalization. They have already began to fall back however indicated that the bears are still in full control of things and the momentum was short lived.
Bitcoin spiked to a peak of $6,800 eight hours ago when the BitMEX exchanged had a temporary outage causing anomalous trade volumes. The jump marks a 3.6% climb on the day as BTC has now pulled back to $6,690. Ethereum got a small boost from the event but nothing significant enough to alter its price which remains at $285 on the day.
Altcoins are largely in the green at the moment following yesterday’s decline. Their price action is also likely to be temporary as things fall back into bearish territory. Getting the most out of the gains in the top ten is Stellar which is up 5% at the moment to $0.227. The rest have inched up between 1-3% but are already beginning to fall back according to Livecoinwatch.
The top twenty five paints a similar picture with only VeChain posting a larger increase of 7%. VET is now trading at $0.015 which is up around 90% from its level this time last Wednesday at $0.008. The VeChain Thor blockchain has been experiencing a surge in transactions however some Reddit comments suggest that this could just be mainnet testing. Lisk is also climbing by a similar 8% to trade at $4.23.
Other altcoins pumping at the moment are Cortex up 23%, Waltonchain rising 16%, and Aurora and Nano adding 12-14% to their prices. Kin and Aion are both losing over 5% at the other end of the scale.
Aside from these apparently manipulated gains no other cryptocurrency is standing out this Wednesday morning. If one US exchange can have such an immediate impact on market levels then the industry has a long way to go before this irrational volatility is tempered and some sense of stability can be achieved.