18,000 Bitcoins went into the BitMEX wallet

Seventeen different cryptocurrency wallets were involved in a large transfer of BTC to a wallet believed to belong to major trading platform BitMEX. According to CryptoCompare, the total value of these coins is currently over $114 million.

The first transaction took place at 4:50 am New York time. The first wallet only transferred 10 Bitcoins to the BitMEX wallet, but 16 others transferred a total of 17,990 BTC within half an hour of the first transfer. Shortly after, some Twitter users suggested that the trading platform may be involved in market manipulation. It is noteworthy that the movement of such volumes from different addresses to one wallet occurred just a few hours before the price of the main cryptocurrency recovered from a fall below $6,000. While many cryptocurrency exchanges have been accused of trying to manipulate market prices, this seems unlikely in this case since the 18,000 BTC consolidated into the BitMEX wallet represents only 0.1% of all bitcoins in circulation. However, often, cryptocurrency “whales” such as exchange trustee Mt Gox pool a very large number of coins into one address before selling them. As Crypto Globe reported in March, Mt Gox trustee Nobuaki Kobayashi sold $400 million worth of BTC, which many believe had a significant impact on cryptocurrency market prices. Kobayashi also consolidated 16,000 BTC and 16,000 BCH into one of his cryptocurrency accounts in late April. These massive transfers tend to cause concern among investors as they suspect it could potentially lead to huge sell-offs. In the case of BitMEX, the exchange may attempt to transfer large amounts of coins to cold storage wallets to keep them safe. It was recently reported that cryptocurrency exchange Bithumb, which lost $30 million due to a hack in June, had already done something similar. Presumably to avoid further losses from the hack, Bithumb consolidated a huge amount of coins from thousands of wallets into a single address. Due to the extremely large number of transactions, which also had exorbitant transaction fees, the Bitcoin network was temporarily overloaded.

Another reason why BitMEX is able to move such a huge number of coins is to try to increase liquidity on the exchange.. Notably, within 24 hours, the Hong Kong P2P trading platform traded a record 1 million BTC, worth a total of $8 billion.

According to https://www.cryptoglobe.com