Bitcoin Surges To Over $41k, Crypto Exchanges Suffer From Outages

by Arjun Agarwal

Bitcoin, dubbed as the largest cryptocurrency to date, made another historical bullish move, as prices per BTC reached over $41,000 on some exchanges. Currently, Bitcoin’s price made yet another move into the green, recording $41,749.96 as of press time. 

Bitcoin’s price rally managed to gain a third of its current price in just a week, recording a high of $40,350, before retreating to the $38,800 area. Shortly after the retreat, Bitcoin’s price rebounded and jumped with close to $2,000 to trade at the current levels, according to data from Cryptobrowser.io

Some analysts are also highlighting that one BTC is currently worth more than a 20-ounce bar of gold. An ounce of gold is trading around the $1,900 price point at the time of writing. Analysts, however, also gave out a warning sign, as Ryan Selkis noted that the parabolic price movements of Bitcoin have been observed just three more times in its history – in April 2013, November 2013, and during Bitcoin’s rise to $20,000 in December 2017.

“So if you're feeling whiplash, you're not alone,” Selkis added on Twitter.

Josh Rager followed the opinion of Ryan Salkis, adding that the market may witness a large market correction, which already happened in several instances.

“The people in this market are used to 20 to 30% pullbacks but can they handle a 50%+ pullback. Could shake out a few. $50k + seems like the ideal FOMO number to bring in new people. This probably won’t happen, but eventually, we’ll see a multi-week 30%+ pullback,” Rager noted.

Meanwhile, as Bitcoin sets new record highs each day, major crypto exchanges like Coinbase, and Binance, experienced technical difficulties. Coinbase, for instance, has suffered the most technical glitches, as isitdownrightnow.com reported. 

Coinbase made an announcement that the company is aware of the issue, noting that the team is “working quickly to restore service back to normal.”

Furthermore, Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao announced that "Bitcoin ATH comes with ATH loads," clarifying that the primary reason behind the outage is "a small WebSocket issue.” 

Gemini seems to be among the least-affected exchanges, but also experienced “degraded performance." However, Gemini noted that the exchange "experienced no downtime or outages today although there have been brief periods where users may have experienced some site slowness during high peak periods."