What has caused the massive decrease in the price of cryptocurrencies?

If you see the change in price of the major cryptocurrencies in the last 24 hours, you will see a sea of red, as shown below.

But, what has caused such a massive decline in the prices? Well, according to my knowledge, it has to do with a hacker getting hold of the trading API keys of some users of the popular exchange Binance, as reported here. It is suspected that the hacker got hold of those keys through a phishing site, and that he used Viacoin buy and sell orders to launder money to his account.

According to that article, some users' altcoins were sold, and later even their Bitcoins were sold for Viacoin, which caused an unintentional surge in the price of Viacoin, as you can see in the chart below.

As a preventive measure, Binance later temporarily froze withdrawals. They also said that only those users were affected, who had registered API keys, which are commonly used in trading bots.

Later on, Binance's CEO Changpeng Zhoa tweeted that everything is fine, and that the unintentional trades would be reversed. That tweet is shown below.

We have localized the irregular trades, they will be reversed. All funds are safe, thanks to the fast alarm. Please learn to secure your accounts against phishing. https://t.co/o3AGfYsWtW

— CZ (not giving crypto away) (@cz_binance) March 7, 2018

The link given in this tweet, points to a steemit article written by Changpeng Zhoa 4 months ago (https://steemit.com/binance/@czbinance/securing-your-trading-account). In that article, Changpeng Zhoa explains on how to protect yourself against phishing attacks.

According to the same article, some users claim that they never used such trading APIs, and this has caused a massive FUD among people, who think that the site itself was hacked. This FUD consequently caused panic selling and therefore the sudden fall in prices.