Crypto Today: Bitcoin treads water around $11K, XRP suffers losses on hack concerns

Since the start of the week, major cryptocurrencies had been trading in relatively tight ranges amid a lack of fresh headlines surrounding the possible banning and regulating of cryptocurrency exchanges in South Korea and China. However, on Friday, news of a major exchange in Japan potentially being hacked triggered a short-term panic sell-off. 

Coincheck, one of Japan's largest crypto exchanges, earlier today announced that it halted all the withdrawal/deposit transactions of NEM and urged customers to stop trading activity after $400 million worth of coins were lost. "After hours of speculation, Coincheck Inc. co-founder Yusuke Otsuka said during a late-night press conference at the Tokyo Stock Exchange that the company didn’t know how the 500 million tokens went missing, but the firm is working to ensure the safety of all client assets," Bloomberg reported.

NEM, the 10th-largest cryptocurrency with a market capitalization of $7.6 billion, dropped sharply and lost more than 10% in value against the USD. As of writing, NEM was down 9.4% at $0.85. One of the most actively traded tokens, Ripple's XRP, also suffered heavy losses on the news and was last seen trading at $1.24, where it was dropping 5.75%.

Although Bitcoin and Ether both came under pressure and recorded losses, they remained in their horizontal trading channel. Despite today's concerning development, the total market capitalization of all cryptocurrencies remained steady near $550 billion.i