Wednesday's price fall comes after news on Tuesday that Coinbase, one of the largest cryptocurrency trading platforms, was to allow the trading of bitcoin cash — a spin-off of bitcoin that launched earlier in 2017.
However, just hours after bitcoin cash trading started on Coinbase, the site suspended that trading after bitcoin cash's price spiked, prompting concerns about possible insider trading by people who had been pre-briefed about the announcement.
"Given the price increase in the hours leading up the announcement, we will be conducting an investigation into this matter," Coinbase's CEO Brian Armstrong said in a blogpost."If we find evidence of any employee or contractor violating our policies — directly or indirectly — I will not hesitate to terminate the employee immediately and take appropriate legal action."
Also on Wednesday, a group of Australian researchers published the findings of a study that showed almost half of all transactions in bitcoin are associated with buying and selling illegal goods and services, including drugs, weapons and pirated software.
Using techniques usually associated with forensic accounting, the group of researchers led by Talis Putnins, a Professor at the University of Technology Sydney, found that blockchain technology underpinning bitcoin holds significant promise for revolutionising many industries.
"But this sort of illegal activity risks stunting the adoption of this technology and limiting the potential benefits to society," Putnins said, according to our colleagues at Business Insider Australia.Despite that, according to crypto tracking website coinmarketcap.com, the total global market capitalisation of cryptocurrencies has now passed $600 billion