Bitcoin Rebounds After Crash, Namecoin Falls 20% Below Parity

Petar Kotevski -

Since our last update five days ago, Bitcoin had a dramatic fall of 100 dollars that saw prices briefly dip below the $300 mark. Alternative cryptocurrency Namecoin fell by 20 percent after breaking the $1 parity level. Both BTC and NMC reversed a lot of the losses yesterday. The same bust/boom pattern was seen across all altcoins as everyone first followed big brother bitcoin lower, then higher.

Bitcoin Falls Below $300

Bitcoin lost 100 dollars in five short days, going from a high of $388.95 on September 30th to a low of $285.01 on October 5th. The move lower wasn’t caused by any major news announcement. Here’s a 4 Hour chart of the crash and the subsequent rebound in prices.

During the last volatility explosion lower on Sunday, a large sell order of 30,000 bitcoins appeared on BitStamp at $300. The massive order created an immediate panic in the market, depressing prices by over 30 dollars on BitStamp. At the same time, Fxopen’s MetaTrader platform experienced an outage that lasted for almost an hour. When trading resumed on the MT4 station, BTC/USD was trading lower by 18 dollars at $285.

The picture above was taken later in the day on Sunday when the mysterious order on BitStamp reappeared, this time at $320 per coin. This again caused an immediate market reaction but prices only dipped 10 dollars this time around. About 1 hour after the order was placed, bulls started to chip away at it, buying small chunks of bitcoins. Soon after, the trader withdrew his order. With the threat of 30,000 bitcoins (over $8 Million) hitting the market now gone, prices undertook a massive rally from $300 to $342.99. The chart below shows this move up, the yellow rectangle marks the time when the $320 BitStamp order appeared and was later removed. Prices are currently quoted at $316 for one coin.

Namecoin Falls 20% Below Parity

In our last two articles, we mentioned that Namecoin was stuck trading in large range between $1 and $1.20. Right as bitcoin was making new lows, NMC followed suit and broke the parity level. Few hours after the break, NMC/USD was already trading 10 percent lower at $0.90. By Sunday, the altcoin lost a further 11 percent and hit a swing low of $0.783. The cryptocurrency later rallied to retest the $1level but was repelled and is currently trading 9% below parity at $0.911.