Bitcoin Drops as Unknown Person Sold Off $300,000 Worth of Coins

• Bitcoin Drops as Unknown Person Sold Off $300,000 Worth of Coins

Bitcoin has lost 5.04 percent of its value in the last 24 hours, according to data obtained from Coindesk.

The digital currency failed to break the US$10,000 resistance level anticipated by most traders prior to Bitcoin’s third halving.

Bitcoin declined from US$9,294.34 per coin it traded in the last 24 hours to $9,371.60 as traders continue to sell off their holdings.

On Wednesday, about $300,000 worth of Bitcoin was reportedly transferred from an old inactivity account dating as far back as the earliest days of the blockchain network.

The over 31 Bitcoins sold off by an unknown personality rumored to be Satoshi Nakamoto, an individual or a group of people likely to have invented the cryptocurrency, triggered a broad-based sell-off on Thursday.

“No matter who moved the coins, it did cause a mean ol’ nasty spike on the charts,” wrote Mati Greenspan, founder of foreign exchange and cryptocurrency research firm Quantum Economics, in an e-mail to clients.

The news of the transfer plunged Bitcoin by 7 percent and further led to the liquidation of over $40 million worth of Bitcoin futures contracts on BitMex, according to Skew.

“This occurrence highlights the importance of ‘address watching,'” Jose Llisterri, co-founder of crypto trading platform Interdax, told CoinDesk’s Daniel Cawrey. That includes “monitoring the addresses of whales/early miners and the so-called ‘Satoshi coins’ mined in the first months of bitcoin.”