In the early hours of Sunday morning, Bitcoin hodlers were rudely awoken to possibly the worst joke in history. CoinStats – a crypto portfolio tracking app – malfunctioned and showed the price of Bitcoin hovering around the $28,800 mark. The meteoric 396% rise in price will have had many holders screaming with joy at 2am in the morning, but their hopes and dreams came crashing down when they checked the price using other crypto apps.
It’s still unclear what caused the app to malfunction, but it’s not the first time this type of situation has occurred. Blockfolio – another crypto portfolio tracking app – is notorious for these types of bugs.
Untrustworthy Applications
While a 400% price increase in a matter of seconds is virtually impossible without some sort of market manipulation, many people believed the stats were in fact true. The crypto world has developed an unhealthy reliance on portfolio tracking apps, and many holders no longer check proper charts – such as those available on TradingView. Earlier this year, BitStarz News explored why trusting these types of applications – more specifically CoinMarketCap – is dangerous. These apps rely solely on the data given to them by exchanges, meaning that it’s all too easy for exchanges to manipulate rankings and values. The CoinStats issue was an internal malfunction rather than an exchange falsely reporting, but it does highlight the fact that these apps simply can’t be trusted.
Is Bitcoin Going to Slide Further?
On Friday, Bitcoin carried on its epic rise and eventually touched $6,100 by Saturday morning. However, since then we have seen a significant amount of accumulation, as Bitcoin fell back down to the $6,000 mark. We have now seen two clear H&S patterns in the past 7 days, hinting that a further slide could still come into play. If Bitcoin does in fact slide, we could see it fall to the bottom end of the $5,000 range. We can’t see it lasting long down there before bulls push the price back higher, making it an excellent opportunity to buy some more cheap Bitcoin before the next halving event.
Hopefully not too many crypto holders made rash decisions before checking other price sources – such as buying the entire bar a round of drinks, or selling everything in app. While these bugs are to be expected in relatively new apps, in this day and age they shouldn’t happen. Excited Bitcoin holders will now have to wait even longer to see their 400% gains become a reality – sorry guys.
