The crypto market is at a loss this week after Bitcoin fell below the $8,000 price mark once again.
Unfortunately, last week's upward strike did not last long, and Bitcoin's loss caused other crypto assets to go in the red zone.
This led Ethereum, the second largest cryptocurrency, to fall to a monthly performance of around 5 to 10 percent in the negative.
In just one day, the top 10 major coins by market cap fell down, as some even notice a price drop of 11 percent.
Apropos, $40 billion were wiped away from the total market capitalization, regardless of last week's improvement when the market cap reached more than $300 billion.
Despite this situation, a new report shows that the top 10 crypto deals in 2017 had an average investment return of over 136,000 percent.
The year was most profitable for IOTA, an Internet of Things-focused crypto platform, which clinched a remarkable 614,934 percent investment return.
NXT holds the second place with returns of over 500,000 percent, while Ethereum (ETH) is in the third place. This popular crypto asset brought over 141,000 percent returns to its investors.
CEO of MasterCard Bashes Cryptocurrencies
In other news, cryptocurrencies received yet another attack this week, this time from MasterCard President and CEO Ajay Banga.
According to Banga, Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies should not be considered as a medium of exchange, as their prices have been subject to fluctuation.
He went on by describing coins as "junk" and expressed concern of the statistics that show how a staggering number of 95 percent of all illegal transactions on the dark web are conducted using cryptocurrencies.
Back in May, MasterCard noticed a drop in quarterly growth as a result of the decline of people who started using their cards to purchase cryptocurrencies.
Many prominent public figures disagree with the use of digital assets, in large part due to their connection to the dark web.
A Good Week for Zcash
Despite a slight price downfall, the privacy-centric coin Zcash saw a lot of market action in the last few days.
The peer-to-peer local cryptocurrency exchange Liberalcoins integrated Zcash into their platform.
By expanding their offering, Liberalcoins now lets you buy and sell Zcash coins for cash. It's the first peer-to-peer local exchange that offers this privacy coin.
In addition to this, last week the blockchain security firm BitGo added support for the digital asset on its platform.
According to the company, ZEC is now supported in cold storage custody and multi-sig wallets, joining other major crypto assets including the top three-Bitcoin, Ethereum and Ripple.
BitGo was founded in 2013 and claims to process 15 percent of the total Bitcoin transactions.
Zcash is not one of the most popular cryptocurrencies, yet it holds a valuable place on the market.
It's one of the few privacy-centric coins, and its zero-knowledge method allows users to send encrypted transactions.
Game Pulled from Steam after Allegations of Mining Monero
Abstractism, a platform based game on Steam, was pulled from the store after allegations that the game was spreading malware for mining cryptocurrencies on the players' computers.
The suspicious amount of CPU and GPU power that this simple game was using was one of the warning signs that led to this.
The creators of Abstractism even encouraged users to keep the game running all the time.
This allowed hackers to mine cryptocurrencies using the power of the victims' computers.
After scanning the program for malware, the developer Okalo Union explained that the game is currently used for mining Monero coins, and continued by saying that Bitcoin is outdated.
A recent analysis conducted by experts at Positive Technologies shows that over 10,000 hack-for-hire and malware-related services are conducted through darknet markets.
The leading type of malware demand is the one for crypto-mining, with a total of 20 percent.
The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation has a total of 130 ongoing cryptocurrency-related cases, Bloomberg reported last week.
Many of these investigations are targeting the dark web, or more precisely the illicit drug sales, ransomware attacks, kidnapping and human trafficking going on these markets.
According to Kyle Armstrong, a supervisory special agent leading the FBI's virtual currency initiative, the FBI has thousands of active cases, making crypto cases just a "small sliver" of all investigations.
However, during the Crypto Evolved conference that was held earlier this summer in New York, Armstrong pointed out that these illegal activities facilitated by digital asset payments have noticed an increase.
Additionally, U.S. prosecutors recently seized $17 million in BTC and other cryptocurrencies.
According to a Department of Justice press release, two Maryland men, Ryan Farace and Robert Swain, were indicted on charges of selling illicit drugs on the dark web.
The case was a part of a nationwide operation targeting vendors of illicit goods on the dark web.
