Hackers: There’s no question that exchange hacks continue to plague the nascent digital currency market, and over the weekend the amount of funds pilfered from such venues surpassed a total of $1.3 billion, according to The Block’s research. The most recent hack, which occurred at Bithumb, resulted in the loss of $19 million worth of EOS and XRP, making it the eighth-largest hack in crypto history. Of the total $1.3 billion hacked, approximately 61% was taken in 2018.
Bullish Key Players: Bitcoin (BTC) has been trading in a narrow corridor from $11,701 to $10,751 as its highest point during the day. The leading crypto has lost 6.25% over the past 24 hours, and is currently trading at $10,969. In terms of its weekly performance, bitcoin has seen a price drop by 2.73%. Bitcoin has become less correlated with other cryptos in Q2 2019 due to a potential “flight-to-quality” in the recent bull run, according to a Binance report on crypto correlations released today. Average correlation between bitcoin and all other major crypto assets declined to 0.61 from 0.73 in Q1 2019. Earlier today, Justin Drake, an Ethereum 2.0 researcher at the Ethereum Foundation, said that ethereum might decrease issuance ten-fold by 2021.
Banks & Institutions: An official at the Bank of Japan has ruled out the use of central bank digital currencies because to do so may require the country to abandon cash. According to a report by Reuters, Masayoshi Amamiya, deputy governor of the Japanese central bank, on Friday cast shade on the notion that central banks could make negative interest rate policies more effective by issuing their own digital currencies. The issue comes down to the fact that, if the BoJ issues a digital yen and set a negative interest rate, individuals and businesses would effectively be charged for holding the CBDC. As a result, he argued, holders would drop the digital coin and instead hold cash.
Adoption: American provider of investment data Weiss Ratings has ranked Litecoin (LTC) as “excellent” in regards to investment rewards and adoption. Digital currency ratings unit Weiss Crypto Ratings has classified the fourth largest cryptocurrency in terms of market capitalization LTC as “excellent” when it comes to investment rewards and adoption. At the same time, the agency ranked the altcoin’s investment risk factor as “fair,” which resulted in the B- rate in the risk to reward ratio.
