Unfortunately for crypto traders, the cryptocurrency market is having its second meltdown in the space of a week.
In Asian afternoon trade there is a sea of red in the market with heavy declines across the board.
This has reduced the value of the entire market to US$375 billion according to Coin Market Cap, down almost 8% or US$31.4 billion since this time yesterday.
What happened?
These declines appear to be related to reports that Microsoft's search engine, Bing, has followed in the footsteps of tech giants Facebook, Google, and Twitter by banning crypto-related advertising.
Bing has acted because it felt that cryptocurrency advertising brought elevated risk to its users and gave some unscrupulous people the opportunity to participate in predatory behaviours. The ban is expected to come into action at the end of June to early July.
Here is the state of play at the time of writing:
The Bitcoin (BTC) price is down 6% over the last 24 hours to US$8,225.31, reducing its market capitalisation to US$140.1 billion.
The Ethereum (ETH) price is off 6.3% since this time yesterday to US$686.13. This leaves Ethereum with a market capitalisation of US$68.2 billion.
The Ripple (XRP) price has tumbled over 8.5% during the period to 68.2 U.S. cents, leaving it with a market capitalisation of US$26.7 billion.
The Bitcoin Cash (BCH) price has plunged over 12% lower since this time yesterday to US$1,252.66, reducing its market capitalisation to US$21.5 billion.
The EOS (EOS) price has fallen 13.4% over the last 24 hours to US$12.35, bringing the EOS market capitalisation down to US$10.6 billion.
Outside the top five the declines have been worse, possibly due to concerns that some of the smaller cryptocurrencies will struggle to gain the attention of traders without advertising.
Since this time yesterday the Litecoin (LTC) price is down 7.4%, Cardano (ADA) is 11% lower, Stellar (XLM) is down 9.5%, IOTA (MIOTA) has fallen 4.3%, and TRON (TRX) has seen its price fall 10.8%.
While the market is in panic mode once again, it is hard to deny that the move by Bing is a good one. Restricting bad apples from participating in the industry can only be a good thing.
But this selloff does highlight how high risk the industry can be. In light of this, I would urge that anyone dabbling in cryptocurrencies does it with money they can afford to lose.
