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Editor's note: This story and its headline were updated after publication to clarify that Arkham's 'Mt. Gox alert' was reported in error.
Bitcoin erased the gains made earlier today, plunging as much as 7% in an hour to below $28,000, per CoinGecko data.
At time of publication, the price of Bitcoin stood at just under $27,750, down 4.6% on the day and 8.4% over the past week.
The wider crypto market crashed alongside Bitcoin, with the top 10 coins by market cap all down over the past hour and 24 hours, barring stablecoins. Ethereum dropped in tandem with Bitcoin to just under $1,830.
The news came on the heels of erroneous tweets from the DB Newswire account on Twitter, which reported that blockchain analytics firm Arkham had sent an alert indicating wallets linked to defunct crypto exchange Mt. Gox and the U.S. government had moved significant amounts of Bitcoin. Arkham CEO Miguel Morel told Decrypt that the wallet movements weren't connected, meaning that the U.S. wasn't necessarily the one moving or selling assets related to Mt. Gox.
Roughly an hour later, Arkham posted on Twitter that the alert was, in fact, reported incorrectly. "Today we fixed a bug related to Bitcoin alerts that caused us to no longer under-send alerts to a small subset of user’s private labels," the company tweeted at the time. "This was one of them. This fix won’t affect any additional users, and was unrelated to labels generated by Arkham."
Representatives for the company did not immediately respond to Decrypt's requests for further comment at the time.
Then, late Wednesday, the company revised its findings again.
"We have conducted an investigation of the DB Alert situation, and determined that the Arkham alerts were sent accurately in this case," Arkham wrote. "DB set two alerts on all Bitcoin transactions above $10k USD, with no counterparties set, then named the alerts 'Mt Gox' and 'US Gov.'"
https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1651366459547713537
The bug fix triggered previously configured alerts, and "no one received inaccurate alert." In other words, DB labelled these wallets incorrectly, which is what caused the confusion, according to Arkham.
The company went on to note that its alerts and the attention on Twitter had nothing to do with the sudden dip in the price of Bitcoin.
"Neither the alert nor the tweet could have caused the sharp BTC price drop today, as the drop occurred between 19:17 and 20:01 UTC, and the alerts and tweet were sent afterwards at 20:07 UTC and 20:08 UTC respectively."