Current Bitcoin Price: $3669 (as of 9:30 AM PST)

Since our most recent newsletter from Friday of last week, the cryptocurrency market has hardly moved. Bitcoin has shifted downwards by less than $30 (representing a total change just under 1%), while XRP and Ethereum have similarly refused to budge.

Truth be told, most of the activity is happening on the daily. The market is chock full of currencies down between half a percent and three percent — and there are just a couple of coins making any upwards progress.

Top Bitcoin & Crypto News Stories for 15th January 2018

Altcoin exchange Cryptopia hacked

Cryptopia is a cryptocurrency exchange based out of New Zealand, best known for listing scores of ERC-20 tokens that were hard to find elsewhere. Aside from those ERC-20 tokens, the exchange also offered support for most major cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin, Litecoin, and Ethereum.

Yesterday, a hack on Cryptopia servers forced the exchange to shut down operations. While details of the hack are still largely unknown, at least 8 figures of funds have been juggled around in recent days, suggesting that the damage could be as much as $10 million. The Cryptopia website is still offline at this time.

Congressman: most cryptos aren’t securities

Darren Soto is a US congressman for Florida’s 9th district. He recently held an interview with media site Cheddar, where cryptocurrency and its regulation was discussed.

In the interview, Soto shared his opinion that most cryptocurrencies aren’t, in fact, (or rather, shouldn’t be) securities, adding that “securities laws can be very intense and hurt the market unless it’s truly a security.”

HSBC settles $250 billion in trades with DLT

HSBC is one of the world’s largest banks. While it’s based out of London — with a large presence in the United Kingdom — HSBC is truly a global bank, with a significant share of the market in most continents.

Earlier this week, HSBC announced that they had been using distributed ledger technology (DLT) to help settle transactions; by now, they have cleared more than $250 billion in transactions — especially foreign exchange transactions — using the tech.