Daily Times

After a minor recovery from the December 4 brutal sell-off on Sunday, the cryptocurrency market returned back to the losing streak on Monday, with the market capitalisation shedding 4.7 percent to reach $2.33 trillion as of 1210 hours GMT. The largest cryptocurrency Bitcoin price went down by 1.54 percent to reach $48,620. With this decrease in price, the market capitalisation of the biggest cryptocurrency has reached 918.5 trillion. Bitcoin, saw a sharp decline of nearly $15,000 to as low as $42,000 before bouncing back to $45,000 on Saturday, extending the latest downtrend amid the emergence of the omicron Covid-19 strain.

Ether, the world’s second-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalisation, shed 3.68 percent to reach $4,048. With this decrease in price, the market capitalisation of ETH has reached $475.7 billion.

Similarly, XRP price went down by 5.87 percent to reach $0.775. The market capitalisation of XRP stands at $77.5 billion after this decrease.

Likewise, Cardano (ADA) price dipped by 6.14 percent to reach $1.30. Its market capitalisation has reached $42.6 billion with this decrease. Likewise, Dogecoin (DOGE) price shed 5.54 percent to reach $0.166.

With this decrease in price, the market capitalisation of DOGE has fallen to $21.9 billion. Meanwhile on Monday, crypto exchange BitMart pledged to compensate users who lost money after a major “security breach” saw hackers steal $196 million worth of cryptocurrency. BitMart was hacked on Saturday in what the crypto-savvy have described as one of the most devastating centralized exchange hacks to date.

A tweet from security analysis firm PeckShield was the first to draw attention to the hack on Saturday night, when one of BitMart’s addresses showed outflows of entire token balances, some of them worth tens of millions of dollars. PeckShield estimated the losses at around $100 million in various cryptocurrencies on the Ethereum blockchain and at $96 million on the Binance Smart Chain.

BitMart initially claimed that the outflows were routine withdrawals, slamming reports of the hack as “fake news.” However, hours later, CEO Sheldon Xia confirmed the outflows had indeed been a hack. They had resulted, he said, from a “security breach” caused by a stolen private key that had seen two of BitMart’s hot wallets compromised.