Arkham denies erroneous Bitcoin alert; says alert was sent just after 6% crash Arkham denies erroneous Bitcoin alert; says alert was sent just after 6% crash
News source DB claimed that a U.S. government address was active based on that alert.
2 min read
Updated: Aug. 4, 2023 at 3:22 pm UTC
Cover art/illustration via CryptoSlate. Image includes combined content which may include AI-generated content.
Market intelligence platform Arkham Intelligence denied on April 26 that it sent an erroneous message to certain users.
Arkham denies any error
Arkham denied that it made any such error, writing:
“We have conducted an investigation of the DB Alert situation, and determined that the Arkham alerts were sent accurately in this case.”
The platform suggested that DB, also known as tier10k, set two alerts on Bitcoin transactions worth more than $10,000 and named those alerts “Mt Gox” and “US Gov.”
Arkham’s account of events suggests that DB inferred those certain Bitcoin addresses were transacting based on labels that he himself had set. DB then tweeted publicly that addresses tied to the U.S. government and Mt. Gox were transacting crypto.
When it became clear that no such transactions had taken place, DB asserted that Arkham had made an error. He said that the platform had confirmed that a “bug fix deployed today caused alerts to be sent erroneously to [a] small subset of users.”
DB had seemingly confirmed this with Arkham, and Arkham appeared to admit partial error in an earlier tweet. But Arkham, in its latest message, denied all wrongdoing and said that the alerts were correctly sent to DB and that “no one received inaccurate alerts.”
The event that ultimately caused the alert may be non-standard on-chain activity. Some commentators have speculated that an Ordinals inscriptions on the relevant addresses made those addresses appear to be engaged in a transaction without actually moving funds, thus triggering the alert in question.
Alert was sent later than 6% market crash
The incident roughly coincided with a sharp decline in the value of Bitcoin, which fell 6% to $27,696 from $29,472 in about one hour.
The exact timing of the alert was previously unclear due to the alert’s private status. However, Arkham Intelligence has since disclosed that the alert was sent minutes after the market crash concluded and thus could not have affected the price of Bitcoin.
The cause of the price crash is still unclear.
BTC additionally gained value immediately prior to and after the crash, and the asset’s price is in fact up 3.5% over a 24-hour period as of 12:30 a.m UTC.
Note: This article previously suggested that Arkham was responsible for the error and has been updated to reflect the platform’s latest statements.
Author 
Mike Dalton
Before transitioning to crypto writing in 2018, Mike studied library and information sciences. Currently, he resides on Canada's West Coast.
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