In the hour after the FTX CPI print, more than $110 million was sold off on crypto exchanges.
Some customers couldn’t use the cryptocurrency exchange FTX on Tuesday, when a closely watched economic report on U.S. inflation came out. This made traders very angry.
Sam Bankman-Fried, CEO of FTX, confirmed that the exchange was having problems by saying that “for a lot of people, the website auto-refreshed in a weird way.”
Traders said on Twitter that the FTX interface kept freezing up at 12:30 UTC, when the U.S. consumer price index (CPI) report came out. Bankman-Fried answered that the problem was fixed as of 13:25 UTC.
“Because of the resulting CPI volatility, some users who accessed the exchange through a browser found that their webpage kept refreshing, which made using it slower and more difficult,” an spokesperson said in a corresponding report. “The volatility didn’t cause any downtime, and the exchange kept running the whole time.”
The person said, “This was the only big problem with FTX at the time, and it only affected the website, not the API.”
After the CPI was released, the price of bitcoin dropped from $22,700 to $21,400 because inflation rose by 8.3% in August compared to the same month last year. This was more than the 8.1% rise that was expected.
“Because of the resulting CPI volatility, some users who accessed the exchange through a browser found that their webpage kept refreshing, which made using it slower and more difficult,” an FTX spokesperson said in a statement to CoinDesk. “The volatility didn’t cause any downtime, and the exchange kept running the whole time.”
According to CoinGlass, the volatility caused more than $110 million to be sold off on crypto derivatives exchanges in just one hour.
