Investing.com - Cryptocurrencies continued to decline on Wednesday, with Bitcoin falling to its lowest level since February.
Bitcoin was trading at $6,462.50, falling 5.92% the Bitfinex exchange, as of 7:55 AM ET (11:55 GMT), its lowest level since February.
Other digital coins were lower on Wednesday, with Ethereum, the world’s second largest cryptocurrency by market cap, falling 12.109% to $474.79 on the Bitfinex exchange. Ripple, the third largest virtual currency, decreased 10.21% to $0.54358 while Litecoin was at $95.422, down 11.90%.
The price of virtual coins was rocked by news over the weekend that South Korean cryptocurrency exchange Coinrail was hacked, prompting a sell-off in bitcoin. The incident sparked new concerns over cyber security at virtual coin platforms.
South Korea is one of the top cryptocurrency trading centers, with many of the biggest exchanges. The hack of Coinrail is also just the latest of numerous virtual currency exchange cyber attacks which has weighed on market sentiment.
The coin market cap was also lower, with total market capitalization at $294 billion at the time of writing compared to $297 billion on Friday.
Meanwhile Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) is banning all mining apps on its App Store. The technology giant cited power usage as the reason for banning such apps.
“Apps should not rapidly drain battery, generate excessive heat, or put unnecessary strain on device resources,” the company wrote in its new developer guidelines.
Meanwhile a research paper from the University of Texas claims that Tether was used to manipulate the peak of Bitcoin in December.
The researchers used millions of transaction records to spot patterns, specifically the flow of Tether, which is tied to the value of the dollar and issued by Bitfinex. Half of the increase in Bitcoin prices in 2017 occurred just hours after Tether moved to other exchanges, the paper states.
Concerns that Bitfinex was manipulating Bitcoin surfaced early in the year. Bitfinex has denied it manipulated the price of the cryptocurrency.