The past week has been an interesting time for the world’s most popular cryptocurrency as the coin reached a new three week high. Right before the start of the weekend, Bitcoin suddenly broke away from the bearish path it set out on last Wednesday, supported by a jump in trading interest, and set a new price range of $3,700. However, as market signals indicate, this sudden climb may end over the next few days.
In other interesting news, the Canadian cryptocurrency exchange Quadriga CX that we wrote about last week just shocked the crypto-community once again by losing even more of its users’ money. After the exchange publicly revealed that it had lost access to a cold storage wallet worth USD $190 million following the passing of its CEO, it has now been found to have lost an additional CAD $400,000 in cryptocurrency assets last week, local media house CBC reports.
The shocking news was revealed yesterday in a report from the court-appointed monitor of the search for the missing funds, Ernst and Young. According to the report, the monitor initially found Quadriga CX to still be holding $902,742 in crypto funds but later lost half of it by “inadvertently” transferring them to the same cold storage that locked the other coins.
Market Turns Neutral
Bitcoin’s lowest price point during the past seven days was reached on Friday, when the coin dropped to $3,391.02, while the highest price was hit on Monday, when 1 BTC was briefly sold for $3,692.30. Looking at the stats, it’s evident that the price jump was triggered by a sharp increase in trading volume, which abruptly went from $4 billion to over $7 billion, raising suspicions of market manipulation. However, since morning today, the 24-volume has been dropping, currently sitting at $6.3 billion, while Bitcoin’s market capitalization has ended up at $64 billion.
Our technical analysis shows that the market is in a neutral position, with only 3 out of 12 technical oscillators and 8 out of 12 moving averages being pro-buy. The SMA 100 is over the SMA 200 in this chart, showing there’s less resistance on the upward path. However, with short-term signals being very bearish, we can conclude that the bullish momentum might be weakening as bears are taking over the market to drive the price down. So, keep your eyes out for any sudden movements, particularly during the weekend.
Android App Removed After Theft Warnings
As reported by Forbes magazine, a popular Android app on Google’s Play Store was found to be targeting encryption keys of Bitcoin holders. The app posed as an official app of a legit cryptocurrency service MetaMask and reportedly targeted the clipboard feature of Android smartphones. The clipboard is the service that handles the copy-paste function on a phone. Since cryptocurrency wallet keys are long strings of information that are hard to type, plenty of users will copy their keys to transfer funds, sending them straight to the clipboard.
The app in question reportedly accessed the keys from the clipboard and replaced them with the keys from the hacker’s wallet address. When users would paste their keys, the cryptocurrency they send or receive would then end up in the wallet of the hackers. As official numbers show, the MetaMask Android app is very popular on the application store, having reached an impressive number of 1 million downloads. However, this latest discovery is not only shocking due to the popularity of the app but also the fact that it’s the first case of clipboard malware on the popular Play Store.