Two circulating rumor/explanations:
-people selling BTC to participate the Ethereum IPO. Ethereum directly cashing out BTC to fiat
-the 24th of July self-prophecy about the 234 days bubble rubbing the wrong side
I donīt buy that teories, I think itīs more due a random dump or another unexpected/unknowable reason
The drop happened on July 24 09:00 UTC (17:00 in China), 7 hours after OKCoin opened its International section (July 24 10:00 am in China, 02:00 UTC). The BTC:USD price there opened at 606$ and fell almost immediately to 596$: https://www.okcoin.com/ (wait for the plot to show up). -people selling BTC to participate the Ethereum IPO. Ethereum directly cashing out BTC to fiat
-the 24th of July self-prophecy about the 234 days bubble rubbing the wrong side
I donīt buy that teories, I think itīs more due a random dump or another unexpected/unknowable reason
However the volume of the latter is still tiny (24 BTC in the last 24 hours). Apart from the 7 hour delay, the drop could not have been due to people selling their coins there.
But perhaps the end-of-May rise was due to Mainland Chinese traders stocking up in bitcoin in antecipation of the launch; and the drop was due to some of them realizing that OKCoin/International was not what they expected it to be, for some reason, and dumping their coins back into the Mainland market? Perhaps they had not realized that they needed to re-register, and maybe get over some legal obstacles?