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Even though Bitcoin’s dominance is up and transaction fees have significantly gone down, the crypto market is seeing an overall downturn.
The total cryptocurrency market cap once again dipped below $500 billion, marking the recovery’s second hiccup in the past week. This week the price of Bitcoin rallied up to $11,788 on Bitfinex, but within six hours lost $1,000 and bottomed out at $10,680.
Bitcoin’s dominance is at a monthly high today at 39.4%, corresponding with the recent sharp drop in Bitcoin transaction fees. Exactly a year ago, BTC had about 86% market dominance, a figure that has been falling on average ever since, despite its short rise up to 66% in early December.
Bitcoin’s last transaction fee as recorded by Blockchair was $0.36/kB, a 6-month lows for the leading cryptocurrency. Bitcoin Cash’s last transaction fee recorded at by Blockchair is in fact slightly lower than Bitcoin at $0.22/kB. However, other transactions made this afternoon showed fees of as high as $0.91/kB.
At the time of writing Bitcoin is trading at $10,416 at a market cap of $175 billion.
Local mainstream media outlets in South Korea including Chosun and HanKyoReh have also reported that cryptocurrency premiums within the South Korean cryptocurrency exchange market, better known as the Kimchi Premium, have started to increase again.
Within the past week, South Korean cryptocurrency premiums rose from 2 percent to 7 percent, as the demand for the cryptocurrency market increased rapidly after the holidays.
A lot of altcoins gained value in USD as Bitcoin price stumbled. Ethereum and ERC20 tokens have performed poorly in the past week, and as Bitcoin continues to build momentum, it is likely that Ethereum and tokens based on the Ethereum network will continue to fall against Bitcoin in the short-term.
Top Stories from the Crypto World
1. Hackers cryptojack Tesla’s cloud to mine Monero
According to RedLock, a boutique tech security consultancy, crypto-jacking is set to become one of the biggest security concerns for enterprise computing worldwide.
According to Redlock’s latest research, a changing security context; one that underpins a changing landscape from data theft to computational power theft.
Tesla, a RedLock client, was reportedly a victim of a serious crypto-jacking incident when poor access hygiene resulted in system access credentials becoming vulnerable to external access.
RedLock’s Cloud Security Intelligence (CSI) team late last year, “found hundreds of Kubernetes administration consoles accessible over the internet without any password protection,” providing access to Gemlato and Aviva – two multinational companies.
RedLock’s CSI team noted that, in the Tesla experience, hygiene processes around access keys resulted in tardy rotation practices. In some cases, some access keys hadn’t been rotated in over 90 days, around 40% of the systems verified by the team accounted for this high incidence.
More on this can be found here: https://blog.redlock.io/cryptojacking-tesla
2. Finland to auction 2,000 Bitcoins seized in Silk Road linked drug bust
The Treasury Department has recommended that the government auction off the approximately 2,000 BTC it seized in connection with drug busts nearly two years ago.
“We recommend public auction for the [sale of the] bitcoins. An auction can be used to ascertain the buyer and whether the state receives a payment. In addition, the risks associated with the handling of bitcoins will be passed on to the buyer in the auction, ” said Mikko Kangaspunta, chief of the government’s state treasury division, according to a rough translation.
The report states that the government seized the funds in June 2016, when the Bitcoin price was trading at roughly $600. The defendant in the case – Lasse Juhani Kärkkäinen – received more than 11 years in prison following a conviction for selling narcotics and performance-enhancing drugs on the now-defunct dark web marketplace Silk Road.
3. 16 Japanese cryptocurrency exchanges to create self-regulatory body
Abandoning plans to unite to separate industry bodies, a group of Japanese cryptocurrency exchanges is planning to create a self-regulating body in the aftermath of the infamous recent Coincheck theft.
According to the report, a collective of 16 Japanese cryptocurrency exchanges is drawing plans to install a self-regulating body as early as next week.
The plan is to fast-track a self-regulatory environment to better secure investors, particularly in the wake of the recent hack of Tokyo-based exchange Coincheck where some $530 million in NEM tokens was stolen less than a month ago.