Bitcoin Price Plummets As Major Cryptocurrency Exchange Binance Suffers API-Related Hack

After the compromise was quickly detected, withdrawals and trading on Binance was halted, which means the hacker(s) would not be able to take assets out from the exchange. But the scare has caused major price declines, and that in turn could create real returns for investors shorting crytocurrencies.

Zhao Changpeng, CEO of Binance, said on Twitter that the exchange had experienced ‎irregularities in trading activity and some accounts may have been ‎compromised by phishing. Binance, the second largest cryptocurrency exchange in the world after ‎OKEx in terms of trading volume, emphasizes that all funds are safe at this point for its users.

The hacker(s) led the prices of VIA rise almost 100 times in a few minutes using the compromised Binance accounts and then dumped VIA to cause prices to drop down again. All the accounts suffering from this fate were those using a trading bot API.

Trading bots or algorithmic trading are a technique that uses pre-‎programmed software that monitors the market and execute trades automatically. These ‎bots have long been working on crypto-exchange markets, with some of ‎them mainly designed to pump an alternative coin or token.