Oh, the beauty of everything being related to everything else: http://www.reddit.com/r/BitcoinMarkets/comments/1x5jpx/psa_bitfinex_bugged_out/ "Dear Customers the situation is under control. No money or coins are missing and the problem was due to some malicious trader trying to play with the LTC ticker price in order to take advantage on us. We are now reversing all transactions that took place on our platform during the time when all got messy (approx 7 a.m. GMT). Very few transactions (for a total of 2,000 btc) actually took place on Bitstamp, only limited to the BTC/USD pair (Bitstamp doesn't trade LTC) and they actually took place at a price that was around 750 usd, so no big deal. We enabled the trading engine for a few minutes and then switched it off again to avoid those rats (sorry I cannot think of a better word in this moment) to shuffle things even more and to make our work more difficult. We keep an eye on the price and we can always enable it in the next minutes whilst we reverse trades that took advantage of the abnormality should the price get volatile. The whole operation will not take anyway more than one hour. Thanks a lot for your understanding and we deeply apologize for the inconvenience Giancarlo Bitfinex Team" ------------------------ In short: "This behavior is really a problem for certain bots. If a bot tries to sell LTC and if it even considers the path LTC -> BTC -> USD, it may keep LTC -> BTC process running even if the rate is terrible, while it fails to sell BTC with the fake ticker price of 10000 USD. Recent spikes were caused by bots, " ------------------------- "http://bitcoinwisdom.com/markets/bitfinex/ltcbtc showing 7,746 BTC traded at a price of 1:1 with LTC at 06:59" ----------------------------- "Ok, So this is what happened. Some hackers started playing with the ticker price and made huge profits by force liquidating many positions which made many traders go default. Hackers then withdrew all the coins and escaped. Then after about 4-5 hours Bitfinex team comes and rolls back. So what happened to the money hackers stole? did they pay it out of their pockets? No, they paid it by rolling back other traders ho had shorted. Thank you Bitfinex, Thank you."