Cryptocurrency Weekend BLOODBATH - price manipulation?

The Bloody Crypto Weekend

This past weekend resulted in a bloodbath for the cryptocurrency markets, with two sell-offs within 24 hours that brought the price of BTC down from around $7,600 to $6,620 (approximately - depending on the exchange), which translates to a drop of around 13%. Many altcoins took an even bigger hit as a result, with big coins taking 20-30% hits in their USD value.

So why does the crypto market have these sudden volatile fluctuations in price? Well, in this case, on Saturday the CFTC (US Commodity Futures Trading Commission) and the US Justice Department revealed they subpoenaed four large exchanges - Bitstamp, Coinbase, itBit, and Kraken for price manipulation. This is the result of these exchanges deciding not to provide Bitcoin price data from the exchanges to the CME for the futures trading, namely due to security and privacy concerns.

The market slid just before this announcement, surprise-surprise... Buy the hype, sell the news as always. We also had the South Korean exchange Coinrail undergo an attack from hackers, with around $40 million worth of ICO tokens vanishing. But is this really enough to cause two successive dumps like this? Not in my opinion, there is some manipulation here and I would be very cautious if you plan on playing with margin trading and shorting as there is no telling what the market will do next... Bear trap? Another dump? Who knows...

One thing to look at though is the BTC triple bottom; if the price keeps pushing down and we see a strong support in the low- to mid-$6,000 range, BTC would have a very strong TA chart to enter its next bull run. None of this is financial advice as I am not a financial advisor, but a lot of Altcoins are now significantly discounted again, and big coins like Nano, Ripple, Siacoin and Wanchain for example have very strong charts. There's money to be made there ;).