Bitcoin and Ether Market Update: January 11, 2019

Crypto market erased $13 billion from its total capitalization the last 24 hours. Bitcoin lost eight percent while the rest of the top ten currencies registered two-digit drops.

BTC-USD              

Bitcoin lost five percent of its value between 05:00-06:00 CET on January 10, 2019. The sudden drop resulted in a catastrophic sell-off for the entire crypto market.

The BTC-USD pair closed the day at $3,712 after losing another four percent during the trading session. Nevertheless, the current levels are still well below the December low of $3,280.

The Estonian-based DX Exchange, which launched its platform this week(as reported by BTCManager) is already showing vulnerabilities. According to the IT news provider Ars Technica, an anonymous trader created a “dummy account” to check platform security and reported some serious gaps, which could have compromised large amounts of user data.

The trader sent a trading request from the browser to the platform including a standard “authentication token,” used to request access to a certain service or account. Surprisingly, DX.Exchange did not just allow access, but also send responses that included “all kinds of extraneous data.” The data included other users’ authentication tokens and password-reset links.  In the late evening of January 10, DX Exchange informed they had successfully patched the vulnerability.

Visitors of the Paris tobacco shops can now buy Bitcoin thanks to the French cryptocurrency wallet provider Keplerk. Customers can purchase BTC for the sums of 50, 100, or 250 euros in six Parisien Tabacs.  The buying process includes the use of an alphanumeric code and a QR code, which is received at the shop and then used to unlock the BTC on the company website. Keplerk collects a seven percent fee on each payment, 1.25 of which then goes to the tobacco shop. Adil Zakhar, co-founder of the fintech company added that he plans to expand the project to 6,500 tobacco shops by February 2019.

In the light of the recent 51% attack on the Ethereum Classic blockchain, Reddit user raised the alarm about the state of the Dash network. According to the Redditor, the NicheHash crypto mining marketplace contains the majority of the hashpower on the Dash network (responsible for more than 1,000 TH/s out of 1,900 TH/s).  

Additionally, three of the top miner addresses are controlled by the same entity and combined they have earned approximately 26,665 Dash or $2.2 million.

ETH-USD

Ethereum has been in a downtrend since January 6, but it took a hard hit on January 10 when it lost 23$ of its value to close the day at $129.

$130 remains the current support for the ETH-USD pair, also corresponding with the 38.2 percent Fibonacci level.

Cryptocurrency exchange Gate.io confirmed that the Ethereum Classic 51% attack was indeed successful and the platform detected seven rollback transactions. Four of them were created by the attacker who transferred 54,200 ETC in total. As all the transactions seemed valid and confirmed well on the blockchain, the examiner passed them successfully, stealing 40,000 ETC. The exchange reported they will take all the loss for the users.