Crypto Today: Sell-off in crypto space gathers momentum on Monday

Following a relatively quiet weekend, major cryptocurrencies came under a heavy selling pressure on Monday amid a lack fresh developments to ease concerns over the banning of exchanges in South Korea and China. In fact, on Friday, the CFTC and the SEC announced that they would start examining the trading of crypto assets more closely. “When market participants engage in fraud under the guise of offering digital instruments – whether characterized as virtual currencies, coins, tokens, or the like – the SEC and the CFTC will look beyond form, examine the substance of the activity and prosecute violations of the federal securities and commodities laws,” the official statement read.

As of writing, the BTC/USD pair was trading at $10,650, losing 7.25% on the day, according to the latest available data on coinmarketcap.com while the second largest cryptocurrency in terms of market capitalizations, Ethereum, was down nearly 7% at $975.

After rising above the $3 mark over the weekend on the back of news of Chief Digital Officer of Volkswagen joining the IOTA Foundation as a member of the supervisory board, IOTA fell sharply on Monday after reports of a hack that cost users nearly $4 million. IOTA, which had been criticized for not being user-friendly and forcing users to generate their own private keys via online key generators, was last seen trading at $2.3, where it was dropping 15% on the day. IOTA lost more than 5% against the BTC as well.

The negative market sentiment surrounding the crypto markets on Monday is reflected in the total market cap of all currencies, which decreased to $501 billion on Monday from $633 billion on Saturday.