A seemingly erroneous alert about wallets associated with Mt. Gox and the US government transacting Bitcoin appeared to coincide with a sharp drop in the asset’s price.
Bitcoin’s price fell 8% from ahead of $29,700 to an intra-day low of $27,324 in the span of one hour on Wednesday.
Market participants attributed the sudden downturn to an alert shared by news source “db” or “tier10k” after a tweet, citing blockchain data from Arkham, suggested Mt. Gox and US government wallets were moving large amounts of Bitcoin.
When it became apparent that no such transactions had taken place, db tweeted again saying he had received an erroneous alert from the firm which was triggered by a bug fix related to Bitcoin alerts.
Had to wait to get clarification from Arkham, did not want to point the finger incorrectly. Believe they will make a statement soon.
Will use multiple on-chain providers going forward https://t.co/dRIgKCGDMh
— db (@tier10k) April 26, 2023
Arkham initially confirmed that the alert was sent in error to a “small subset of user’s private labels,” but later put out a statement clarifying that all alerts were sent accurately.
The firm suggested that db had set two alerts from BTC transactions above $10,000, without setting counterparties, but named them “Mt. Gox” and “U.S. Gov” based on his own inferences.
“When we fixed a bug causing us to not send alerts on configs like this, he then correctly received many alerts based on his parameters. No one received inaccurate alerts, they simply began receiving the alerts they had previously set,” said Arkham.
Attached: Screen cap from our database of when the alerts were sent. pic.twitter.com/MpBgcXjExI
— Arkham (@ArkhamIntel) April 26, 2023
The firm also stated that the alerts could not have triggered the selloff, seeing as they were sent at 20:07 UTC and 20:08 UTC, which was a few minutes after Bitcoin’s flash crash.
Still, a number of industry watchers blamed the false alarm for the millions of dollars in Bitcoin liquidations that followed.