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Talk about volatility. Just when we thought prices were starting to recover from China’s ICO ban, Bitcoin is down 9%, Ethereum 13% and Litecoin 18%. NEO and OmiseGo also suffered losses of 18% and 15% respectively.
At the time of writing Bitcoin is trading at $4252 according to Coinmarketcap — a sharp decline from an hour ago when it was hovering above $4650. The crash is supposed to have come from Chinese exchanges that are claiming to stop CNY deposit, while still resuming CNY withdrawals at the same time.
This has sparked panic in China. One of the major Chinese exchanges Huobi is trading Bitcoin at as low as $3836 when the global price is just above $4200.
According to caixin.com, Chinese government might be closing down all the Bitcoin exchanges in China, even the larger ones like Huobi. Rumours or not, news like these are certainly adding fuel to the fire and crashing the market even further.
Someone just dumped ~20,000 BTC (approximately $90 million). Another guy is selling 100 Bitcoin every minute. This is not looking good.
Top Stories from the Crypto World
1. Chinese government plans to shut local exchanges
Having bounced back dramatically from the 20% plunge following China’s ban of ICOs, Bitcoin prices are going down again on very heavy volume as Caixin reports Chinese authorities plan to shut local exchanges.
News via Google translate:
The supervisory authority has decided to close the exchange of virtual currency in China , which involves all the currencies and currencies of the currency , such as “currency line”, “coins” and “Bitcoin China.”
Journalists confirmed the news from the person who came close to the Internet Financial Risk Special Rectification Working Group (hereinafter referred to as the Leading Group) and learned that the resolution had been deployed to the local level.
This is following the September 4 People’s Bank of seven ministries and commissions joint announcement (hereinafter referred to as the announcement) after further supervision action. The announcement will mark ICO (Initial Coin Offering) as “illegal financial activities” and order the ICO to be banned on the date of publication of the announcement. All ICO tokens trading platforms need to be cleared to close the transaction.
However, if traders read the full report, Caixin explains the regulatory crackdown is on ICOs and not Bitcoin. Although we may see exchanges halting withdrawals and deposits until they figure out their next step.
2. Japan’s Conglomerate GMO Internet reveals cryptocurrency mining plans
GMO, founded in the early 1990s, first entered the cryptocurrency space with the opening of an exchange in May. Now the company offers web hosting and a range of other digital services. It is expanding its portfolio with the mining operation, beginning in the first half of 2018.
The mining facility is set to be based somewhere in northern Europe and will produce as much as 500 petahashes per second (PH/s). Currently, the bitcoin network hashrate is approximately 5.68 exahashes per second (EH/s).
3. Chris Belcher proposes decentralized mining
Developer Chris Belcher has an idea for how to fix bitcoin mining – decentralize it. His inspiration comes from the network’s much-discussed Lightning Network proposal.
Belcher explained:
“I propose an improved scheme using payment channels which would allow far more individual hashers to mine on p2pool and result in a much lower payout variance. What’s needed is a way to use off-chain payments where any number of payments can be sent to each individual hasher without using the blockchain.“