Investing.com - Cryptocurrency prices fell on Monday with no clear driver, while the U.S. government recovered stolen bitcoin in one of the rare examples of hacked digital currencies being recovered.
Bitcoin fell 8% to $3,800.50 as of 9:10 AM ET (14:10 GMT) on the Investing.com Index. It gave up all the gains it had made in the previous week in a couple of minutes, in a move that would, in other asset classes, be consistent with a single large seller exiting a position.
Cryptocurrencies overall slipped to $129 billion at the time of writing from $142 billion on Sunday.
Ethereum slumped 17% to $137.51 and XRP fell 10% to $0.3008 while Litecoin was at $44.70, down 16%.
U.S. federal law agencies returned 27.7 bitcoin that was stolen in August 2016 from Bitfinex, Reuters reported. Around 120,000 bitcoin, worth about $72 million at the time, were stolen when the exchange was hacked.
Bitfinex said the bitcoin will be converted to cash and distributed to 5,000 customers impacted by the hack.
The Bitfinex hack was one of many major thefts, including of Mt. Gox in 2014 and Coincheck in 2017, that contributed to investor concern about the security of digital exchanges.
In 2018, $950 million worth of digital coins were stolen, U.S.-based cybersecurity firm CipherTrace said last month.
South Korean exchange Coinbin, which took over the hacked platform Youbit, filed for bankruptcy on Wednesday. The company owns users nearly $30 million and is planning to go out of business due to embezzlement from a senior executive, Business Korea reported. The news comes after Canada-based QuadrigaCX was also forced to file for bankruptcy when it failed to recover the password of its cold wallet after the sudden death of its CEO in December.
In other news, Bahrain’s central bank became one of the first in the Arab world to issue rules related to digital currency assets. The emirate has ambitions to become one of the leading hubs for finances in the Middle East and North Africa, Bloomberg reported on Monday.