On Friday, some Revolut users reported a sudden drop in bitcoin’s displayed price on the app, with charts indicating a sharp decline before quickly returning to market levels. This incident appears to be linked to either a pricing display glitch or a liquidity-related issue.
Revolut’s official bitcoin page showed BTC briefly priced around £29,414 on its one-day chart before correcting near £58,600. While some social media posts claimed the app displayed prices as low as 2 cents, CoinDesk could not independently verify those claims or confirm if any trades were executed at that level.
This anomaly was isolated to Revolut as no exchange listed by CoinGecko and CoinMarketCap reported a bitcoin price irregularity. At the time of writing, bitcoin was trading just over $79,000 during Asian afternoon hours on Friday.
Revolut had not responded to a request for comment from CoinDesk at publication time.
There were unconfirmed reports on X suggesting that some buy orders were executed amid the disruption. If trades occurred, Revolut would need to ascertain whether the displayed prices reflected genuine liquidity, stale quotes, routing issues, or an error in their pricing system.
Flash movements in crypto apps can arise from several factors. A display glitch might show incorrect prices without actual market execution. Limited liquidity at a specific venue or internal pricing rail could also trigger sharp price changes if an order clears through a shallow book.
“Revolut operates with limited liquidity compared to full exchanges. If a significant sell order hits a thin market at the wrong time, it can deplete all available bids down to that level before recovering,” Ranveer Arora, co-founder and CEO of Altura, suggested via message as one possible explanation.
In other scenarios, when market makers temporarily withdraw quotes, spreads widen, and apps using aggregated feeds might display prices that diverge from the deeper global markets.
Similar isolated dislocations have occurred in crypto before. Bitcoin briefly fell far below market on Binance’s USD1 pair in December due to a thinly traded pairing rather than broad selling pressure. Additionally, South Korean exchanges experienced sharp price drops during the country’s 2024 martial-law shock as activity surged and local order books temporarily deviated from global prices.