The corona might of caused the stock markets to crash which might of caused the price of BTC to go from $8000 to $6000, what happened afterwards was due to massive long liquidations on Bitmex.
Why are people so sure about this? How do you know Bitmex wasn't following spot exchanges down?
For prices to fall on spot exchanges, people need to sell real BTC,
on spot exchanges. Long liquidations on Bitmex do not accomplish that, and we know zero withdrawals left Bitmex during the crash because they only process withdrawals during mornings US time.
Nobody knows it was Bitmex-tied algorithms that dumped all that supply. That's just a big unproven assumption.
All we know is inflows to spot exchanges increased ~170K BTC more than usual in the days preceding the crash. Massive supply leads to lower price.
A lot of over-leveraged traders got destroyed on Bitmex, I'll agree with that. I am however not convinced Bitmex controls the spot market.