Bitcoin and ether retreated in a divided August 9 market

Bitcoin and ether ended the August 9, 2020 UTC trading day below their August 8 levels, interrupting the two largest crypto assets’ short-term advance without erasing their gains over the preceding week.

Kraken’s daily market report placed bitcoin at $11,690 after a 0.7% decline and ether at $390.56 after a 1.9% decline. The exchange described both moves as reversals of minor gains recorded on August 8. CoinMarketCap’s end-of-day aggregate independently showed bitcoin at $11,675.74, down 0.72% over 24 hours, and ether at $391.12, down 0.74%.

The figures establish a dated market condition, not a universal closing auction. Cryptocurrency trading continued around the clock across many venues, currencies and liquidity pools, so the August 9 “close” depended on the selected dataset and its UTC boundary.

What Kraken recorded

Kraken calculated its report from public market data distributed through the exchange’s WebSocket interface. Its reporting day ran on UTC time and covered trading in crypto assets and eight quoted currencies: euros, U.S. dollars, Japanese yen, Canadian dollars, British pounds, Swiss francs and Australian dollars, as well as crypto-denominated markets.

Total Kraken turnover was $193.3 million on August 9. Bitcoin accounted for $67.3 million and ether for $40.4 million. Together, those two assets represented approximately 55.7% of the reported venue total; that percentage is Coinburn’s calculation from Kraken’s rounded figures and should not be treated as more precise than the inputs.

The session was divided rather than uniformly negative. Kraken reported gains of 19% for ATOM, 12% for COMP and 11% for MLN against the U.S. dollar. ZEC fell 5.3% and ALGO fell 6.2%. Those returns describe Kraken’s listed markets during its UTC window, not every exchange or every possible trading pair.

The aggregate cross-check

CoinMarketCap’s August 9 historical snapshot used composite market prices rather than one exchange’s trades. It recorded bitcoin’s market capitalization at $215.49 billion on a circulating supply of 18,456,250 BTC, with $17.49 billion in reported 24-hour volume. Ether’s corresponding figures were $43.85 billion, 112,114,545 ETH and $9.45 billion.

The composite prices were close to Kraken’s final levels, but ether’s percentage return differed materially: negative 0.74% in CoinMarketCap’s snapshot against negative 1.9% in Kraken’s report. That discrepancy is not necessarily an error. Kraken measured its own venue and markets, while CoinMarketCap combined market-pair prices from multiple exchanges. Different starting observations, pair weights and data-cleaning rules can produce different 24-hour returns even when final dollar prices are similar.

A contemporaneous ALT 5 Sigma summary, distributed at 4:50 p.m. on August 9, reported bitcoin at $11,645.92 and ether at $390.21. It showed bitcoin down 0.52% but ether up 0.16%. The release did not disclose the precise observation timestamp, constituent venues or aggregation formula, so its figures are useful as an intraday corroboration of price levels but not as a substitute for a fully specified UTC close.

What the snapshot meant

CoinMarketCap still showed bitcoin up 4.81% and ether up 3.23% over seven days at the end of August 9. The negative daily readings therefore described consolidation inside a positive weekly window, not proof that the broader trend had reversed.

No source reviewed for this reconstruction establishes why bitcoin or ether declined. The mixed performance across assets also argues against assigning the entire session to one announcement. The defensible conclusion is narrower: on August 9, two authoritative datasets recorded modest losses for bitcoin and ether, while returns elsewhere in the market remained widely dispersed.

Later CoinMarketCap documentation clarifies that its historical daily ranking snapshots represent the end of each UTC day and that composite prices are volume-weighted across eligible market pairs. That later methodological clarification helps interpret the preserved August 9 table; it does not add later prices or market outcomes to this dated reconstruction.