Bitfinex accused of manipulation after halting their trading services for 60 minutes

Bitfinex, one of the leading cryptocurrency exchange platform announced that they are back with their services after encountering a ‘Service Disruption Post Mortem’ on 31st August 2018.

The exchange platform had made the announcement regarding the issue in a series of tweets, leaving the community screaming that this is manipulation at its best. The announcement comes days after BitMEX, one of the leading cryptocurrency exchange platform, was attacked which led to the forceful liquidation of the shorts.

The first announcement made by the exchange platform on Twitter stated:

“The platform is encountering connectivity issues with one of the servers. As a precautions we had to suspend trading temporarily. We are working hard to have the platform return to normal operations as soon as possible.”

This was followed by Bitfinex stating that their ‘matching engine server’ was restarted without any notice by their cloud hosting provider. The platform said that they were going to restart their servers proceeding which, the trading services would be back to normal. This led to the platform closing down its trading services for almost 60 minutes.

They announced:

“Trading is once again live. We apologise for the downtime and wish you a happy Friday.”

On their blog, Bitfinex said that they started to encounter the issue at 14:55 UTC, restarting the matching server which is core to their services. They stated that they did not lose any data, however, the pending queues were flushed to the database.

Moreover, according to Trading View, during the timeframe of the announcement, Bitcoin [BTC] was trading below the $7000 mark. At 14:55 UTC on 31st August 2018, BTC/USD was trading $6910.

The encountered connectivity issue faced by the exchange coincidences with the expiry of the CME Futures Contract.

Ekliptor, a Twitterati said:

“While I still don’t believe/understand you are having 1 single server as a matching engine for all different markets, I want to congratulate you on your clear & fast communication during this outage”

Xane Corvair, another Twitterati said:

“If that’s true, then your “hosting provider” is being paid by someone that just manipulated this market right when CME Futures expired. Hope you investigate that. If not, shame on you. The person that restarted that server should be detained.”

DiversifyCrypto, another Twitterati said:

“what a coincidence ! provider might have something to do with CME”

Recently, the exchange platform has notified its users about the upcoming API update which is scheduled for 15th September 2018 at 00:00 UTC. There will be a series of changes implemented in the way they manage their WebSocket connections to their APIs.

On the day of the update, there will be a limit of 250 subscriptions to the market feed data such as candles, traders, tickers for every WebSocket.