It has been a disappointing 24 hours of trade for the crypto market and declines are being seen largely across the board this morning.
This has led to the value of the entire market falling 1% to US$220 billion according to Coin Market Cap.
This decline could relate to a report out of the Wall Street Journal yesterday regarding the use of bots to manipulate the price of Bitcoin.
According to the report, unscrupulous traders are wielding purpose-built software to cause the cryptocurrency's wild swings.
Some bots achieve this by utilising a strategy that was similar to spoofing. Which is "a practice in which traders enter fake orders only to cancel them. The tactic, aimed at tricking other investors to buy or sell an asset by falsely signaling there is more supply or demand."
It was outlawed in U.S. stock and futures markets in 2010, but the unregulated nature of crypto market means traders are free to use these tools as they please with Bitcoin and co.
Until issues like these are resolved I suspect the industry will struggle to gain approval for the ETFs that are needed to take crypto assets into the mainstream.
Here is the state of play on Wednesday compared to this time yesterday:
The Bitcoin (BTC) price has fallen 0.3% to US$6,559.20 per coin, reducing its market capitalisation to US$113.5 billion.
The Ethereum (ETH) price has dropped 1.4% to US$226.77, leaving it with a market capitalisation of US$23.2 billion.
The Ripple (XRP) price has been one of the worst performers, falling 5.5% to 54.33 U.S. cents. This has left the alt coin with a market capitalisation of US$21.7 billion.
The Bitcoin Cash (BCH) price has pushed 1.7% higher to US$537.27. This gain has lifted the BCH market capitalisation to US$9.3 billion. Bitcoin Cash appears to be on the rise due to excitement around the Bitmain IPO.
The EOS (EOS) price has dropped 1.2% to US$5.65, reducing its market capitalisation to US$5.1 billion.
Things were similarly bleak outside the top five with Stellar (XLM) down 2.6%, Litecoin (LTC) off 0.8%, and Cardano (ADA) falling 0.7%. Tether (USDT) and Monero (XMR) both managed to make modest gains over the period.
