Chinese miners went offline 3hrs into the difficulty adjustment.
The difficulty adjusts every 2 weeks to match the natural increase in hash rate from miners. This keeps block times to a steady 10 mins. If you're going to slow the network down, this is the best window to do so.
9.5hrs into the difficulty adjustment, 9000 BTC was deposited into Binance, this provided enough selling pressure to drop the Bitcoin price below $59k support, forcing the $4.9b of liquidations.
It's an interesting timing of events.
We have 11 more days before the next difficulty adjustment corrects for any loss in miner hash rate. Note the hash rate is already returning to the network.
This is an addendum to my price crash post mortem thread:
We just saw the single largest 1-day drop in mining hash rate since Nov 2017. The hash rate on the network essentially halved, causing mayhem in BTC price as it crashed.
The power outage in Xinjiang (which powers a significant amount of the BTC mining network) was known before the BTC price crash. Here's local news on 15th April.
9000 BTC was sent into Binance, read that as a sell off of those coins.
I'd note that Binance serves volume from Asia more than the West. It's likely this was sent in from a whale with closer knowledge to happenings in China.
BTC would represent 20%+ of the fund in March 2021. I imagine they would have rebalanced since then, selling down some of their GBTC the last few weeks, given it's a diversified fund.
This is probably the original article from Stuff. It cites $350m AUM, some mismatch from my own search finding $1.75b AUM Sep 2020.
Hmmmm..... Rick Astley spotted buying the dip, rabidly.
Zooming in from weekly to daily... oh yes. Today we have a new all-time-high in BTC leaving the exchanges for 2021. And a new dip buying prize to award.
It's also a new Rick Astley high score.
Remember, the red bars is the daily count of coins moving to Rick Astley, the HODLer of last resort, who never gives up or deserts BTC.