Bitcoin sellers sneaked in around the highest level since January 2018 and triggered the Coinbase terminals' crash during early morning in Asia before the BTC/USD pair takes the rounds close to $12,500.

The cryptocurrency pair surged to the high of $13,862 on Wednesday prior to trimming almost $2,000 to flash the low of $11,640 by the day-end/early Asia.

The US-based cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase couldn’t handle flux of sellers and went off-line with the statement saying "An error has occurred. We've been notified about the issue and are taking a look."

However, around 09:00 PM GMT, the Coinbase further reported that fix for the outage has been implemented while the results are being monitored.

The account with the highest activity, Markay, received fiat credits of CA$220 million and crypto deposits of 34,806 BTC and 540,011 ETH between 2016 and 2018—only 1% of which was supported by any documentation that the fiat or crypto actually existed, the report alleged. In June 2017, the account received a single deposit of CA$100 million, coinciding with a CA$14 million dollar loss that Quadriga attributed to a technical error.

Cotten then allegedly used the Markay account’s fake money to buy real funds from unsuspecting customers, sending a large portion of the proceeds to accounts that Cotten controlled at three other exchanges, as well as “wallet addresses where the beneficial owner of the wallet is currently unknown,” according to the report.

Between 2016 and 2019, Cotten transferred a total of 9,450 BTC, 387,738 ETH and 239,020 LTC out of QuadrigaCX cold wallets. (It is unclear here as to whether the funds were transferred out via the Markay account, or some other means.)

What did Cotten do with funds in his name? He used it to trade—poorly.