Crypto Market Update (26 April 2018)

Market Update

At the time of writing, the Bitcoin price is sitting at $8,879 representing a loss of 4.65% in the last 24 hours. More than $1.4 B worth of BTC were exchanged in the BTC/USD market representing a 23.3% share of the global daily volume. The BTC/JPY pair represents a 53% share.The Ethereum price is down 0.83% over the past 24 hours and is currently sitting at $632, with over $650 M worth of Ether exchanged in the past 24 hours on the ETH/USD pair which has a 40.5% market share of the daily trading volume.

Yesterday, in an interview on CNBC, Adena Friedman, President and CEO of Nasdaq, revealed that the company "would consider becoming a crypto exchange over time." Although she stressed that a clear regulatory framework would need to be put in place first, she stated:
"I believe that digital currencies will continue to persist it's just a matter of how long it will take for that space to mature. Once you say, 'do we want to provide a regulated market for this?' Certainly, Nasdaq would consider it."
Sequoia Capital, a venture capital firm headquartered in California is suing the founder of the cryptocurrency exchange Binance, Changpeng Zhao. The American VC fund reportedly accuses the founder of allegedly negotiating future investments with another firm while he signed an exclusivity agreement with Sequoia. Binance stated:
"Mr. Zhao denies all of Sequoia's allegations relating to the present dispute. As the substantive issues in dispute between the parties are subject to confidential arbitration proceedings, Mr. Zhao will make no further comment on the matter."

Cryptocurrency exchange OKEx has suspended deposits of all ERC20 tokens after they allegedly discovered a serious bug in at least 12 smart contracts built to this token standard. In a statement published yesterday, the Hong Kong-based exchange announced the suspension of deposits, explaining that attackers have exploited a newly-discovered smart contract bug called “batchOverflow” to generate “an extremely large amount of tokens” out of thin air and then deposit them into a normal Ethereum address.
“We are suspending the deposits of all ERC-20 tokens due to the discovery of a new smart contract bug – ‘BatchOverFlow’. By exploiting the bug, attackers can generate an extremely large amount of tokens, and deposit them into a normal address. This makes many of the ERC-20 tokens vulnerable to price manipulations of the attackers.”
Cryptocurrency and blockchain applications have been inching closer toward mainstream awareness every day. Despite massive growth, many say this will be utterly dwarfed when institutional investors arrive to participate in the crypto-economy. One such indicator of this is Coinbase’s estimation that $10 billion in institutional money is currently waiting on the sidelines.
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