Yesterday was a bad day for the cryptocurrency market. Losses were caused by a series of news that generated a pessimistic wave on the cryptocurrency market, which in turn caused the prices of the majority of the cryptocurrencies to drop.
First, the Japanese authorities issued a statement saying they would be sanctioning the cryptocurrency exchanges that do not offer the required security levels and warned them to raise their security levels. Later on, the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) published a report in which it warned that all the cryptocurrency exchanges in the country should be registered and approved by the Commission, except when this entity exempts them from it.
The aforementioned news was sufficient to generate pessimism on the cryptocurrency market and cause losses. Moreover, the reported error on Binance, one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges in the world, when a hacked trading bot triggered an unauthorized massive sale of cryptocurrencies was a cherry on top.
Numerous Binance users reported their altcoins had been sold and exchanged for bitcoin without their approval. Afterwards, these bitcoins were used to buy a cryptocurrency called Viacoin. The rumors of a possible hacker attack on Binance spread quickly in the crypto community and lowered the prices even more. However, it turned out there was no hacker attack. The unauthorized massive sale of cryptocurrencies on Binance was caused by a hacked trading bot that some users linked with their Binance wallets. It was a classic pump and dump attack to inflate the price of Viacoin.
This attack inflated the price of Viacoin to 6.93 dollars and then its price dropped to around 2.6 dollars.
According to CoinMarketCap, the prices of 99 out of the first 100 cryptocurrencies according to the market capitalization went down. The only exception is Nexus whose price rose by 10% to 3.42 dollars per coin.
The main cryptocurrencies on the market, bitcoin, ether and Ripple dropped by 8.07%, 9.09% and 8.04% respectively. The price of bitcoin fell below ten thousand dollars to 9,918 dollars, while the prices of ether and Ripple dropped to 742 dollars and 0.86 dollars respectively. They are followed by Bitcoin Cash, litecoin and NEO. These three cryptocurrencies dropped by 10.17%, 7.40% and 5.61% and their prices went down to 1,077.60 dollars, 182.63 dollars and 99.33 dollars.
The rest of the top 10 cryptocurrencies, Cardano, Stellar, Monero and EOS saw a drop of 14.64%, 7.19%, 10.60% and 3.52% respectively. When it comes to their prices, the price of Cardano went down to 0.24 dollars, the price of Stellar to 0.31 dollars, the price of Monero to 333.67 dollars and the price of EOS to 6.49 dollars.
