Some Revolut users saw bitcoin briefly trading well below market prices on Friday, with app charts showing a sudden drop before returning near current levels, in what appeared to be either a price display issue or liquidity-related dislocation.
Revolut’s official Bitcoin page shows that BTC briefly marked around £29,414 on Revolut’s daily chart before recovering near £58,600. Other social media posts claimed the app was showing even lower impressions, including near-zero prices as low as 2 cents, although CoinDesk cannot independently verify these levels or confirm whether trades were actually being executed there.
The problem appeared isolated, as no exchanges on the lists tracked by CoinGecko and CoinMarketCap showed a Bitcoin price anomaly. It is trading at just over $79,000 as of Friday afternoon in Asia.
Revolut had not responded to a request for comment from CoinDesk at the time of publication.
Some X users claimed that buy orders were executed during the disruption, but these reports have not been confirmed. If the trades were executed, Revolut would likely need to determine whether the impressions reflected legitimate liquidity, stale quotes, a routing issue, or a pricing error on the platform side.
Flash moves in crypto applications can occur for several reasons. A display issue may show an incorrect price without actual market execution. Low liquidity on a specific venue or internal pricing system can also produce sharp wicks if an order crosses a shallow wallet.
“Revolut operates with limited liquidity depth compared to a full exchange, and if a large enough sell order hit a thin book at the wrong time, it could exhaust all available bids up to that level before the price recovers,” Ranveer Arora, co-founder and CEO of Altura, said in a message to CoinDesk as a possible explanation.
In other cases, market makers briefly pull quotes, spreads widen, and applications relying on aggregate feeds may display prices that do not correspond to deeper global markets.
Crypto has already experienced similar isolated dislocations. Bitcoin briefly printed well below the market on Binance’s USD1 pair in December in a move linked to a thinly traded pair rather than a broader sell-off. South Korean stock markets also saw strong local repercussions during the country’s martial law shock in 2024, as activity increased and local order books briefly detached themselves from global prices.
