- Arkham Intelligence states that its information about Mt. Gox and the US government resulted from a bug fix.
- The analytics firm refused to accept that its alert sparked such a decline in the BTC price cap.
- The news was regarded as false because both suspected wallet addresses have mostly been dormant.
The crypto industry experienced a temporary loss which lasted for an hour due to the sudden price twitch of Bitcoin (BTC).
On April 26, Arkham Intelligence, a blockchain analytics firm, sent out alleged false messages to a subset of users, stating that wallet addresses belonging to Mt. Gox and the United States government had moved large amounts of funds.
DB, a popular cryptocurrency media outlet, tweeted this news, resulting in the 7% price crash of BTC. According to the media outlets, BTC fell from $29,850 to $27,789 within an hour of the news.
However, an hour after DB had announced the movement of funds, Arkham Intelligence followed with a tweet stating that it had thoroughly investigated DB’s alert and discovered that the media outlet had set a notification on all BTC transactions above $10,000.
The analytics company acknowledged that it had appropriately delivered DB warnings of Bitcoin transactions in this particular instance; nevertheless, DB had labeled the two wallet addresses as “Mt. Gox and US Gov.”
“When we fixed a bug causing us not to send alerts on configurations like this, he correctly received many alerts based on his parameters. No one received false alerts; they began receiving the notifications they had previously set,” Arkham explained.
In its defense, Arkham claimed that neither the tweet nor the alert sent to a small subset of users could have altered the price of BTC as the price fall happened between 19:17 and 20:01 UTC, whereas the notifications and tweets by dispersed Arkham and DB were between 20:07 and 20:08 UTC.
Adding to the discussion, a Twitter user by the handle of IT Tech provided images depicting that Mt. Gox and the US Government made no transactions. Therefore, the BTC price crash could have been affected by multiple reasons.
The Head of Research at CryptoQuant, Julio Moreno, also weighed in on the matter, confirming that there has been no movement of funds between the two suspected accounts.
Arkham Intelligence and those involved have advised that users verify their news and facts before taking action in the community.
“We recommend that users double-check and verify on-chain before making moves on any information,” Arkham stated.
Conclusion
All eyes were on Arkham Intelligence and DB for allegedly spreading incorrect information about transactions made by Mt Gox and the United States Government. The price crash of BTC was said to have been caused by unknown reasons, as Arkham claims its false news was not the cause.
