Checking current 24 hour trade volumes for BTC, they are currently valued at $3.9 Billion and at the more normal levels in the crypto markets.
The 24 hour trade volume of Bitcoin from the 16th of September, to the 17th, was unusually low. On these two days, BTC 24 hour trades volumes oscillated between $3.1 Billion and $3.3 Billion.
Twitter user @Josh_Roger was one of the few who capture this anomaly of daily volume discrepancies via a tweet on the 16th that stated the following:
$BTC quietly had its lowest volume day since November 6, 2017 (source CoinmarketCap historical 24/hr Volume – all exchanges) Bitfinex hits lowest Bitcoin volume on the weekly chart since July 2017.
The full tweet can be found below.
$BTC quietly had its lowest volume day since November 6, 2017
(source CoinmarketCap historical 24/hr Volume – all exchanges)Bitfinex hits lowest Bitcoin volume on the weekly chart since July 2017
– Josh Rager (@Josh_Rager) September 17, 2018
A Technical Glitch at Tether (USDT)?
On the 17th of September, another twitter user, @vip25_admin, noticed that there had been a significant drop in the global Tether transactions when s/he twitted the following:
#TETHER transactions dropped sharply and last tether transaction was hours ago. Something very strange happening with tether. Be careful if you hold#USDT. Maybe you should switch it to TUSD or something like that.
The full tweet can be found below (with a screenshot from Omni Explorer).
#TETHER transactions dropped sharply and last tether transaction was hours ago. Something very strange happening with tether. Be careful if you hold #USDT. Maybe you should switch it to TUSD or something like that.
– PREMIUM VIP 25 (@vip25_admin) September 17, 2018
Technical Glitch Was Actually from Omni Layer
Further investigating the claims of the glitch at Tether (USDT), we found that the glitch that had caused Tether (USDT) transactions to stagnate on Omni Explorer, was actually from the latter platform. The team at Omni Layer would issue the following statements via twitter:
We are experiencing an issue with the parsing engine that feeds data to Omniexplorer and Omniwallet. It is being investigated.
A second tweet soon followed that explained the issue further.
We have identified the issue with a backend client used by our parsing engine that appears to have locked up/become non responsive. We have restarted all applicable processes and are monitoring them while they verify resync. This process should take ~ 2-3 hours to complete.
The team at Omni Layer would then solve the issue and announce that data verification and resync was now complete and Omni Explorer was back to normal operations. Evidence of this can be seen in the chart below that shows a spike in the Tether (USDT) transactions reported on the website from the 16th.
So What Caused The Low BTC Trade Volumes?
In conclusion, we can completely eliminate Tether (USDT) from being the cause of the low BTC trade volumes witnessed on the 16th and the 17th of September. This is due to the fact that the glitch in verifying the data was from the backend of Omni Layer that operates Omni Explorer: a platform that tracks USDT transactions.
Therefore, the incident of low BTC trade volumes was an independent phenomenon by itself and could be an indicator of the current bear market continuing further rather than abating like everyone wants it to.