Cryptocurrency users may have noticed there is something strange going on with the Kraken exchange. A lot of currencies see major spikes for the price. Bitcoin has seen a few of those in the past 24 hours. Ethereum suddenly surged to 7.8 BTC, instead of 0.078 BTC. It is unclear what is going on exactly right now. Some people claim trading bots are messed up, but it shows Kraken may have a big problem.
What is Going On With Kraken Trading?
It is rather unusual to see multiple currencies hit fake price spikes on one exchange. To be more specific, it is possible this is a human error. Fat-finger trading occurs more often than most people would think. Users accidentally enter a zero too much or too many and execute their orders accordingly. This can have some real problematic consequences, though.
Fake price trades often represent the wrong price for a particular cryptocurrency. In the case of Bitcoin, the EUR price spiked to over 2,200 EUR multiple times in the past 24 hours. That is very odd, considering it only broke the 2,000 EUR mark for the first time yesterday. Right now, one BTC is valued at 2,055 EUR. To the untrained eye, it would appear Bitcoin hit a brief spike and crashed down again. That is not the case, even though it is visible on the chart.
Unfortunately, it appears Bitcoin is not the only currency on Kraken to see fake price spikes. Ethereum has seen a similar incident this morning. The ETH price briefly jumped to 7.87 BTC. That is quite the change from the normal 0.0787 BTC price. Such a major spike could set off a buying frenzy for Ethereum, though. All of this goes to show traders need to be more careful when they place orders. Luckily, all of these trades generate next to no volume on their own, though.
It is evident something unusual is going on at Kraken. Whether it is bots of human error, remains unknown for now. Some trading markets have little liquidity, although that shouldn’t facilitate fake price spikes. The exchange could do with more liquidity across all trading markets, though. Additionally, it seems buy and sell orders don’t always get matched automatically lately, which is a bit of a concern. We can only hope these issues are resolved sooner or later.
Header image courtesy of Shutterstock
