Bitcoin Price Is $5,500 On BitFinex And $5,190 Elsewhere: Here Is Why

After last week’s fiasco involving BitFinex and Tether, when the New York Attorney General Letitia James had to weigh in with a court order, investors were expecting the cryptocurrency market to become bearish. The bitcoin rate against the U.S. Dollar (BTC/USD) initially turned bearish and fell below the $5,000 level to $4971. However, to everyone’s surprise, it finished the busy trading week above the coveted psychological support around $5,000 per bitcoin.

The problem is, there is a substantial divergence between the price of BTC/USD on most cryptocurrency exchanges and BitFinex.
On Sunday, the BTC/USD on popular cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase was trading around $5,190. However, at the same time, BitFinex was quoting the price of BTC/USD at near $5,500!

If we carefully examine the line charts of the BTC/USD price of Coinbase and BitFinex since the beginning of the week, it is clear that time to time, the price diverges on these two exchanges. The fact is, it is perfectly normal to have a small difference in the price of any commodity among exchanges due to the difference in trading volumes and supply and demand conditions.

The crypto community is used to price differences between BitFinex and other exchanges such as BitMEX, But, when the difference of price amounts to a sizable $300, roughly 6%, it prompted analysts to dive into finding the reason behind such substantial divergence.