Bitcoin halts longest rally since Dec after 24% jump
madrid — Bitcoin is snapping its longest rally since December and retreating before a trendline set from its record high that month. The largest digital currency dropped 2.9 per cent to $8,579 as of 12:48pm in London, according to prices compiled by Bloomberg. Bitcoin had increased 24 per cent over its five successive days of gains.
“Bitcoin is struggling for momentum along the trendline, after all of those gains,” said Neil Wilson, market analyst in London for online trading platform ETX Capital. “And if people can now withdraw from the Japanese exchange, that’s going to make a difference.”
The drop came as Japan’s Coincheck Inc., which froze withdrawals after a cybertheft last month of about $500 million, said it would begin letting some users take out their yen. The company, Japan’s second-largest cryptocurrency exchange before the hack, said later on Tuesday that users withdrew ¥40.1 billion ($373 million.) More Bitcoin is traded in yen than in any other currency, according to Coincompare.com.
Coincheck continues to allow Bitcoin trading, but has frozen all other activity on its platform and is not permitting withdrawals of rival digital coins until security checks are taken with a third-party firm — and only after reimbursing those whose coins were stolen in the hack Coincheck users withdrew ¥40.1 billion ($373 million) from the cryptocurrency exchange on Tuesday, the first day customers were allowed to pull out in the wake of the cyber-theft of about $500 million last month.
The target of the biggest theft of digital coins in history on Tuesday began allowing yen withdrawals for the first time, triggering the exodus of money. Chief Operating Officer Yusuke Otsuka is still sticking to promises to compensate users, though he wouldn’t go into the root causes of the heist during a hastily arranged briefing in Tokyo. — Bloomberg