Ethereum price crashed on the GDAX/coinbase exchange earlier today 6/21/2017 at 3:30pm-3:45pm (EST) down to 10 cents usd. Due to high network congestion, coinbase transactions were extremely delayed (suspended for some time) as well as the ethereum network as a whole.
A lot of speculation entails to the release of 3 major ICO's opening around the same time. Due to the nature of ICO's, ethereum is required and their smart contracts to convert currency into tokens. The known ICO's include: Status, Civic, and idice with speculation entailing to Status causing the most problems. Due to the high amount of failed Status ICO transactions with high priority on the blockchain, along with $30 million usd sold successfully; the blockchain became backlogged.
Other major exchanges seemed to have avoided the crash according to the charts, with some temporarily freezing withdraws.
Spencer Bogart posted on Twitter:
"Wondering if that flash crash was an ICO converting proceeds. If so, that's a painfully expensive mistake".
ICO's in whole has had a huge impact in the cryptocurrency as many "whales" are dumping their held bitcoin and alt coins in exchange for tokens. Many buyers are taking advantage of the higher volume and lower prices and many more sold out of fear.
Time will tell when the Ethereum network will work on scalability and "get" the buyers in.
USA Senate bill s.1241 also likely had/has a huge impact as well. You can directly read about it in the link below or follow for further posts i'll be writing regarding government regulations.
hxxps://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/senate-bill/1241/text#toc-idea0e9489fc8f46379f95bb56c8bbbda5
Please replace hxxp with http
