The bad week that crypto traders were having certainly got a whole lot worse during trade on Wednesday.
At the time of writing the ten largest cryptocurrencies are all posting notably large declines. In fact, nine out of the ten have dropped lower than 9% over the last 24 hours.
The worst performer in the group has been the Cardano (ADA) price, which is down a whopping 16% since this time yesterday to 49.8 U.S. cents. This has reduced the fifth-largest cryptocurrency's market capitalisation to US$12.9 billion.
What happened?
Whilst it is unclear why Cardano is falling harder than the rest, the overall sell-off of cryptocurrencies appears to have a number of catalysts today.
As I mentioned earlier today, bitcoin (BTC) and the altcoins came under pressure overnight after South Korean regulators officially banned anonymous cryptocurrency trading in the country on Tuesday.
This may just be the first of many bans to come. China, Japan, the United States, and the United Kingdom are all believed to be planning similar moves. I believe this is likely to weigh heavily on trader sentiment for some time to come.
In addition to this, social media giant Facebook announced today that it will ban adverts that are promoting cryptocurrencies, initial coin offerings, or binary options. According to CNBC, the ban has come into effect immediately and covers its Instagram platform as well.
This is another blow for the industry and I wouldn't be surprised if search engine giant Google does the same in the near future.
What now?
I think that cryptocurrencies are simply too risky at the moment given the current environment and are more likely to go down than up.
Once the industry is overhauled by regulators, then I'll be taking a close look at Ripple (XRP) and Stellar Lumens (XLM) due to their superior technologies. But until then, I'll be watching on from the sidelines.
