Did Someone Just Buy 45 Bitcoins for USD 14?

Users of Singapore-registered cryptocurrency exchange BitMax (39th by reported trading volume) are scratching their heads as it looks like someone managed to buy 45 bitcoins for USD 14 today, which would normally cost c. USD 458,100.

Today, a screenshot started to circulate in social media allegedly showing the order book data from BitMax – it appears that traders could’ve bought a BTC for 0.32 USDT (stablecoin Tether) which means that, while you’d (at the time of writing) pay USD 10,180 per BTC, you were able to buy 45 of them for c. USD 0.32 per coin. That’s not all. Users could’ve bought ETH for USD 18, and LTC for 20 USD. Their current prices are USD 192 and USD 74 respectively.

Meanwhile, BitMax users on their Telegram channell are wondering how these buy orders were able to stay on the order book for at least a week when the exchange does not allow to set buy orders that are “far from the market price.”

This anomaly coincided with problems with Amazon’s cloud service, Amazon Web Services (AWS), in the Asia-Pacific region, which disrupted exchanges’ work today. AWS’ status page confirms that there were issues at the Tokyo facility and it has been resolved.

Meanwhile, BitMax announced that “due to abnormal market fluctuations, the exchange has temporarily suspended trading service for certain accounts” – those which had traded during 1:00 a.m. – 3:30 a.m. EDT on August 23rd. “Trading of these accounts will be resumed upon completion of confirmation and follow-up measures”, the announcement states.

BitMax did not respond to our request for comment.

Also, Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao said that this major exchange was having problems too, stating that with AWS having issues, “mostly with caching services”, it was affecting some users globally. On Binance, it was causing “causing some 500 error messages on APIs and affecting some withdrawal processing.”

Furthermore, exchange KuCoin stated in a notice on their website that due to the overheating of part of their chassis in the machine room they deployed in AWS, Tokyo, part of their services might become unavailable. “The engineering operation team is currently deploying relevant resources of high availability across regions to deal with any possible emergencies that might happen”, they said, warning that some services might be affected during the deployment.

KuCoin’s CEO Michael Gan told Cryptonews.com that the exchange’s core business was barely affected, “as we have deployed the cross regional high availability cluster and the servers got influenced by this incident was immediately switched to the backup server”, adding that “since those of being affected needs a period of time to get resumed, hence the announcement was released.” The CEO said that they will continue applying the pre-stated risk control deployment and that it performed as expected. “However, the main server was somehow affected by this incident and the backup server is running to coverup the mess, and we need to prepare more servers to avoid being further affected,” Gan said.