Cryptocurrency News Update: Bitcoin explores area below $9,000; altcons in red

Here's what you need to know on Thursday

Markets:

BTC/USD dived under $9,000 during early Asian hours and recovered to $9,180 by press time. The first digital asset has lost over 1% since the start of Thursday and over 5% in the recent 24 hours. The coin settled above $9,000 amid the short-term bullish trend and high volatility.

At the time of writing, ETH/USD is changing hands at $232.30. The price touched $227.26 during early Asian hours, but managed to regain the ground above $230.00. ETH/USD has lost over 6% in the recent 24 hours, and 1% since the start of the day. The coin is moving within a short-term bullish trend amid high volatility.

XRP/USD is hovering at $0.1825, down over 4% on a day-to-day basis. The price touched the intraday low at $0.1785. Now it is moving within a short-term bearish trend amid expanding volatility.

Among the 100 most important cryptocurrencies,Quant (QNT) $8.32 (+20.9%), Flexacoin (FXC) $0.0031 (+8.55%), DxChain Token (SNX) $1.75 (+5.9%). The day's losers are Seele-N(SEELE) $0.0853 (-21.8%), Siacoin(SC) $0.0029 (-12.83%), Bitcoin Diamond(BCD) $0.6526 (-12.12%).

Chart of the day:

BTC/USD, 1-hour chart

Markets

Bitcoin's sell-off below $9,300 might have been triggered by the outflow of miners funds. The cryptocurrency research company Glassnode found out that 2,650 BTC (about $25 million) were sent to Bitfinex. It was the largest outflow of Bitcoin from miners to exchangers in over a year. CryptoQuant also registered a massive outflow from Chinese mining pools HaoBT and Pooling. However, those transactions were not directly linked to cryptocurrency exchanges. 

Meanwhile, XRPL Monitor issued another fraud alert on Wednesday as 29.5 million XRP was transferred from one of the accounts associated with PlusToken scam. The sender performed three consecutive transactions in a stream of nine crypto transfers to move the coins. 

Industry

According to the recent report published by CipherTrace, the number of bitcoin ATMs has been growing rapidly, suggesting that they may be used as a way to by-pass anti-money laundering (AML) requirements. The experts noted that Bitcoin ATMs are often used to send money to trading platforms known for facilitating criminal activity and money laundering.

The percentage of funds sent to high-risk exchanges from U.S. BATMs [bitcoin ATMs] has seen exponential growth, doubling every year since 2017. While approximately 2% of U.S. transactions went to high-risk exchanges in 2017, that number is now knocking at the 8% mark, the report says.

Algorand Foundation announced the issuance of the US Dollar-backed stablecoin functionality powered by, USD Coin (USDC), in partnership with Circle. The coin is based on open standards and governance framework developed by the Center Consortium. Circle will ensure that digital dollar stablecoins that are interoperable with USDC and thus enable customers to move funds between traditional banks and payment networks to digital dollars on the Algorand blockchain.

Fangfang Chen, COO of the Algorand Foundation, commented:

As more financial institutions and enterprises look to build decentralized financial applications, they need a well-suited infrastructure and a compliant, regulated, and widely accepted stablecoin.  We are excited to partner with Circle to provide financial institutions with the tools they need to leverage the unique benefits of USDC and offer enterprise-grade solutions to build real-world use cases.

Regulation

ING has launched a protocol that will help the cryptocurrency exchanges and other companies dealing with digital assets to comply with the Financial Action Task Force'd Travel Rule Protocol (TRP). The solution developed by ING is supported by several traditional financial institutions like Standard Chartered Bank, Fidelity Digital Assets, and cryptocurrency companies like BitGo. The protocol offers RESTful (Representational State Transfer) API, which allows transferring data via internet. The virtual service providers participating in the protocol will be able to address entries that can be further identified.