Bitcoin price fell below the key support level of $7,000 on 16th December and was trading at $6,940.82 at press time. The fall did not come as a big surprise for traders as the king coin has been registering daily lows in the past week. The next support is at $6,800 and if fails to hold that ground then $6,400 could be the next support level. Bitcoin started the year near $3,500 and then continued to rise in the second quarter and again started to fall in the final quarter.
Many investors were predicting that the BTC price would again touch the roof after a prolonged winter in 2018, however, analysts warned that 2019 could be the consolidating year, and actual bull run might start after the Block Reward halving in early 2020. Now a Chainalysis report has suggested that the reason behind the falling price of Bitcoin could be the dump made by PlusToken holders.
https://twitter.com/chainalysis/status/1206593918734938112?s=20
Chainalysis Assesment of PlusToken Dump
PlusToken was a Chinese cryptocurrency wallet which promised high returns to users who purchased the native PlusToken against Bitcoin and Ethereum. As a result, many people invested in the Ponzi scheme and soon the value of PlusToken rose to $350. News media houses reported that the scam accumulated over $3 billion before vanishing.
Chainlysis was able to track a total of 180,000 Bitcoin, 6,400,000 Ethereum, 111,000 USDT, and 53 OMG (OmiseGo) sent to PlusToken wallets. Scammers usually make use of mixing services to hide their transactions among hundreds of others. Chainlysis in their report claimed that despite the arrest of 6 people related to the scam, the pocketed cryptocurrencies were being liquidated through OTC desks mostly on Huobi platform.
The study claimed that the scammers were able to cash out at least $185,000,000 through OTC brokers. The blockchain analysis firm kept a track of on-chain and off-chain trading volume. They tracked that the on-chain volume of BTC from PlusToken is mainly sent out to 26 OTC brokers on Huobi and noted that after every large liquidation, there was a dip in BTC price. One such prominent liquidation happened on September 20th where scammers liquidated more than $34 million worth of BTC.
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