UPDATED 21:07 EDT / OCTOBER 11 2018

BLOCKCHAIN

Cryptocurrencies plunge as market uncertainty spreads to digital assets

Cryptocurrency prices plunged into Thursday as a plunge in the stock markets Wednesday spread to digital assets.

Bitcoin led the red ink, dropping by as much as 7 percent to trade at its lowest price since Aug. 10. As of 8:45 p.m. EDT, the cryptocurrency was trading at $6,188.19, slightly up from a low of $6,128.24 earlier in the day.

The contagion spread across all leading cryptocurrencies, with Ether dropping 11.2 percent to $200.28, Ripple XRP down 11.5 percent to under 41 cents, Bitcoin Cash down 12.6 percent to $450.80 and Litecoin down 10.8 percent to $51.79.

The drop in cryptocurrencies alongside broader markets is notable given that crypto has often been pitched as an alternative “safe haven” to park money. And certainly through last year, crypto was seen as a market with strong growth.

The drop in equities markets alone may not be the only driver of the crypto crash. The International Monetary Fund issued a warning that cryptocurrencies present a serious risk to financial systems.

“Cybersecurity breaches and cyber attacks on critical financial infrastructure represent an additional source of risk because they could undermine cross-border payment systems and disrupt the flow of goods and services,” the World Economic Outlook report said. “Continued rapid growth of crypto assets could create new vulnerabilities in the international financial system.”

Bitcoin has also been targeted by Nouriel Roubini, one of the few economists who predicted the 2008 financial crash. He told the Senate Banking Committee Thursday that bitcoin is the “mother of all scams” and that blockchain was the most hyped tech ever.

“Crypto is the mother or father of all scams and bubbles,” CNBC reported Roubini as saying. He went on to call out “scammers, swindlers, criminals, charlatans, insider whales and carnival barkers (all conflicted insiders)” who tapped into “clueless retail investors’ FOMO [‘fear of missing out’],” then took them for a ride with pump-and-dump schemes for “scammy crappy assets at the peak that then went into a bust and crash — in a matter of months — like you have not seen in any history of financial bubbles.”

Highlighting waning demand for cryptoassets, a report form Tribe Capital claims that the number of monthly U.S. customers buying and selling leading cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase Inc. in September declined about 80 percent from December, when the price of Bitcoin reached its all-time high of nearly $20,000.

Other retail-focused exchanges likely saw similar declines, the report noted.

Image: Maxpixel

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