Can Exchange Platforms Trade Surveillance data reflect the COVID-19 crisis?

As part of providing risk aml solutions for cryptocurrency assets, at Scorechain we also provide trading information looking at services and exchanges inflows and outflows.

Let’s have a look at this notable correlation between the ongoing Covid-19 crisis, Bitcoin price and exchanges on-chain trades.

Can the recent event related to the Covid-19 crisis explain the Bitcoin price fluctuation?

What is really interesting to notice in this chart is the symmetrical correlation between the Bitcoin price and the volume on the exchange platforms.

The Bitcoin market was quite stable even if the sanitary crisis yet caused damages in Asia. 

The price of 1 BTC swang between $7,000 and $10,000 from the beginning of the year and that was an oscillation we were used to. 

Bitcoin withdrawals and deposits also remained constant with daily volume respectively around $12,000* and variation more or less every 3 days.

Scorechain trade surveillance data illustrates how the pricing fluctuation is correlated with the volume of inflows and outflows on exchange platforms.

• Withdrawals and Deposits volumes are quite the same and follow the same curve
• Bitcoin pricing volatility follows the same curve as funds coming in and out on crypto exchanges platform

But suddenly the market faced an unprecedented crash.

As soon as Trump announced the European travel ban, trading volume on exchange platforms has surged and Bitcoin price dropped intensively.

The activity chart perfectly illustrates the panicked rush after Trump European announcement. 

The Bitcoin plunged to its lowest since January at $3,600. This incredible crash makes Bitcoin’s biggest daily drop in the last seven years.

Human traders reflect the panic on the crypto market and it’s not surprising to notice how it can be similar to the trade stock market behaviour. 

In the past few days we can come to the conclusion that the very large volume on exchanges had a strong impact on the Bitcoin price.

Of course Covid-19 crisis is not the only factor and we should also consider broader geopolitical events.

Even if we tried to highlight bitcoin trading with the recent news, we should not forget that the Coronavirus crisis situation is not an isolated event in the social, geopolitical and economic world. As stated in a great article written by CoinTelegraph we should not forget for example the current oil war¹. 

Scorechain deanonymizes the Blockchain for Risk AML and provides financial data to traders.

In 2018 at the same period of time, the correlation yet existed and the recent events have proved once again the sensitivity of the market regarding geopolitical events. 

Scorechain gathers Bitcoin trading information from more than 600+ exchange platforms all over the world. As part of internal and compliance controls, some companies are looking at the exchanges platforms funds coming in and out to detect any fraudulent behaviour such as insider trading like whales or , exchanges trade agreement could be. 

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*Data extracted from Scorechain exchange naming: analysis of 600+ exchanges. www.scorechain.com 

¹https://cointelegraph.com/news/crypto-traders-explain-what-caused-the-bitcoin-price-plunge-to-3-000