Woo noted reports identifying the blackouts were published late last week, with the power outages occurring to facilitate safety inspections in response to a recent flooding accident at a local coal mine that saw 21 miners temporarily trapped underground after power and communications went down.
According to the Cambridge Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index, or BECI, Xinjiang represents nearly one-quarter of the global hash rate.
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The analyst notes yesterday saw the largest daily drop in total Bitcoin network hash rate since November 2017, with hash rate plummeting from 172 million terahashes per second, or TH/s, to less roughly 154 million TH/s, according to Ycharts.
Popular crypto market analyst, Willy Woo, has attributed the violent April 18 cryptocurrency crash to a sudden drop in hash rate resulting from a power outage in the Chinese region of Xinjiang.
Woo points to 9,000 BTC that was transferred to Binance on April 16, speculating the funds were likely sent by a “whale with closer knowledge to happenings in China.”
Coupled with heavy selling in the quarterly futures markets, the downward momentum drove $4.9 billion worth of Bitcoin liquidations and a further $4.4 billion in margin calls in the altcoin markets — with a record 1 million accounts being liquidated.
However, not everyone agrees with Woo’s analysis, with Cinneanhaim Ventures partner, Adam Cochran, describing “the idea that a power outage last night in a mining region in China led to the dop in $BTC” as “utter nonsense.”
Woo noted that long-term whales who rarely sell have been buying heavily amid the dip, adding that the lower $50,000 range is forming “the largest cluster of price discovery since BTC was below $10k.”
“Validation of BTC as a trillion dollar asset is immensely strong,” he said, adding that 13.5% of the entire BTC supply has been moved on-chain while Bitcoin’s capitalization has exceeded $1 trillion.
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