Bitcoin Price Flash Crash on Binance.US Attributed to Trader Algorithm Bug

It all happened in a blip, and an exchange official says the institutional trading customer has since fixed the issue.

Bitcoin’s 1-minute price chart shows drop to $8,200 at 11:34 UTC. (TradingView/CoinDesk)

Bitcoin’s price briefly crashed 87% and then recovered within the span of a single minute early Thursday on Binance.US, in a fleeting but very real flash crash that the cryptocurrency exchange attributed to a “bug” in an institutional customer’s trading algorithm.

At 11:34 UTC (7:34 a.m. ET), the price fell from around $65,760 to as low as $8,200, then quickly bounced back up to almost exactly where it was before.

“One of our institutional traders indicated to us that they had a bug in their trading algorithm, which appears to have caused the sell-off that was reported this morning,” a Binance.US spokesperson told CoinDesk.

“We are continuing to look into the event but understand from the trader that they have now fixed their bug and that the issue appears to have been resolved,” the spokesperson said, declined to comment on further details about the crash.

On other cryptocurrency exchanges, bitcoin’s price dropped around the same time, but by nowhere near as much. On Bitstamp, for example, the price fell about 2.3% at 11:34 UTC but never got below $63,600.

Omkar Godbole contributed reporting.

QR 2 Square Logo

Digital assets posted a third consecutive quarter of losses in Q2 2026, the longest losing streak since the 2022 bear market, as institutional capital rotated into AI equities and Bitcoin ETFs recorded their largest quarterly outflow since launch. Our report examines what drove the divergence, where structural adoption continued regardless, and what Q3 signals to watch.

Why it matters:

Digital assets posted a third consecutive quarter of losses in Q2 2026, the longest losing streak since the 2022 bear market, as institutional capital rotated into AI equities and Bitcoin ETFs recorded their largest quarterly outflow since launch. Our report examines what drove the divergence, where structural adoption continued regardless, and what Q3 signals to watch.