Major League Baseball spring training doesn’t open up for another month-and-a-half, but a swing & miss slump outside the batter’s box is already happening in the cryptocurrency market. Cheesy sports metaphors aside, 2019 has been a crumby start to the crypto trading season.
And today was no exception. Following a brief period of recovery yesterday, all of the top 20 cryptocurrencies by market cap have fallen, as a sea of red has descended, yet again.
At press time, Bitcoin (BTC) is down 2% on the day to trade at US$3,706.80. The world’s leading cryptocurrency started the day above the psychological threshold of US$3,800, while on the weekly chart the highest price point was registered on January 9th at US$4,107.
The new number-two by market cap, XRP (the native currency of the Ripple network) has lost almost 2.3% of its value over the last 24 hours, currently trading at around $0.35. XRP did not experience significant price fluctuations today, but it is significantly down from the intraweek high of $0.38 seen on January 9th.
The total crypto market capitalization is around US$120.5 billion, now down from its intra-week high of US$138.6 billion.
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New Zealand Police stormed the office of a Christchurch cryptocurrency trader after it lost what appears to be millions of dollars worth of currency in a major security breach.
Cryptopia, a New Zealand-based cryptocurrency exchange focused on small-cap assets, has become the latest victim of cyber-crypto hack. While it’s still unclear why Cryptopia’s trade volumes are currently not currently listed on major exchanges, it claims to list over 800 different assets and supports small-scale crypto asset trading pairs.
According to an official statement from the company, the platform suffered a “security breach on January 14th”. The hack resulted in “significant losses,” company representatives said, apologizing to their users for the delays in service.
However, the breach reportedly happened on January 13th and the exchange initially informed its users that it was undergoing “unscheduled maintenance.” Several updates were also released in the meantime, but none provided any details about the reason for the maintenance.
The Christchurch Police and their High Tech Crimes Unit have been notified and are currently investigating the matter as a major crime, the exchange said in its statement. Cryptopia’s website has since gone offline and all transactions were suspended.
