In a surprise move, the South Korean justice minister announced that the government is going to ban all cryptocurrency trading.
South Korea is one of the world's most active cryptocurrency arenas, with Ripple in-particular being a major focus in the country.
CoinMarketCap recently took the step to remove all Korean price averages from its calculations, as it wasn't reflective of what an English-speaking person would be able to achieve. However, this could have much bigger ramifications for the global market.
The Justice Ministry distributed a statement according to Reuters stating "There are great concerns regarding virtual currencies and the justice ministry is basically preparing a bill to ban cryptocurrency trading through exchanges".
As you can imagine, this caused prices to plummet. Ethereum has fallen by 13.6% over the last 24 hours, Ripple has fallen by 11.75%, Cardano has fallen by 10.54% and Bitcoin is down 5.82%.
This news is still new and it's likely that many in America, which is where most trading happens, won't see this news for the next few hours. It will become apparent by Australian morning time how heavily this will affect the market.
This news just goes to show how distrusting governments are of cryptocurrencies and how much of an effect they can have on prices, even if cryptocurrencies were invented to circumvent governments to begin with. I wouldn't be surprised to see the prices fall by 15% or even worse.
I'd much rather stick to the plain, old share market and buy shares of exciting businesses like Xero FPO NZX (ASX: XRO) and Altium Limited (ASX: ALU). They might not grow by 100% in a day, but at least you can value them by how much revenue or profit they make.
