The price of bitcoin fell more than $1,000 in the span of about 10 minutes on the CoinDesk Bitcoin Price Index (BPI) today, just hours after the cryptocurrency set an all-time high above $11,000.
The digital currency dropped more than 18 percent from a record high of $11,388.33 to current levels around $9,292 on Wednesday, according to CoinDesk.
Trading was extremely volatile as exchanges such as Coinbase's GDAX struggled to keep up with the surging demand.
"There's no fundamental value to any of this stuff and it's all based on ... supply and demand at any point in time," said Leigh Drogen, a former trader who now heads Estimize, a 6-year-old company that collects and publishes financial estimates for data such as earnings.
Coinbase, the leading U.S. website for buying and selling bitcoin, reported record-high traffic Wednesday. Services were unavailable for some customers. Coinbase's GDAX exchange also reported "performance issues and downtime" Wednesday afternoon, but as of about 3:20 p.m. ET, it said those issues had been resolved.