Over the course of the past 24 hours, Bitcoin’s (BTC) value toppled to the bottom of its long-established trading range, after which the currency settled down near the US$6,340 mark. While not entirely unexpected, this latest drop is quite vanilla compared to what many so-called “market experts” had been predicting over the past couple of days.
Along with BTC, a host of other top-10 digital currencies, including EOS, B Cash (BCH), and Litecoin (LTC), also dropped by around 3 to 5% overnight. Not only that, the total market cap of the crypto sector fell from around US$210 billion to $203 billion. However, when put into context, this latest fall is quite minor and should not affect the long-term performance of the altcoin domain.
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Another factor that could have been behind this latest market drop could be the hacking of Canadian cryptocurrency exchange MapleChange. Through a post on Twitter, the company announced that over the weekend they had fallen victim to the activities of third party criminals who pilfered more than US$6 million in MapleChange’s client digital assets.
The firm also announced that it was temporarily shutting down its social media accounts as well as its website until more information could be gathered on the matter.
However, the co-founder of Ethereum and Consensys founder Joseph Lubin, said “digital currencies are not on the edge of a collapse”. He was speaking recently in an interview with CNBC, providing some general overview on current market conditions.
In the interview, Lubin spoke about how the ecosystem has seen several “booms and busts” within the past ten years. However, he noted that it has never looked so strong than it is today given the strong fundamentals that are seen with the ecosystem. The number of projects that are going on and people brought into the blockchain-sphere are a testament to the evolution of the industry.
He added that “the foundational infrastructure is getting built out.”
