The cryptocurrency market hit a new low this year after last week's price fall.
The total market cap plunged to less than $190 billion on Wednesday, in a relatively poor week for cryptocurrencies.
At the beginning of September, the price dropped a surprising $40 billion in less than a day, marking one of the highest declines in the past three years.
The lowest the crypto markets have been this year was in mid-August when the total cap fell to $192 billion.
Bitcoin (BTC) is still pressing close to last week's price and is currently standing at almost $6,400.
Following the market dip, this digital asset dropped by more than 10 percent.
However, several altcoins felt the fluctuations even more intensely, making them lose up to 30 percent against Bitcoin.
Ethereum (ETH) went through a turbulent week and was standing at a price that has not been seen for over a year.
The second largest coin fell under the $200 price point, despite the efforts to keep its preferred $300 mark.
In other news, the events have led Bitcoin to obtain market dominance of roughly 58 percent. This was a new high for the leading crypto asset in 2018.
Monero on the Rise as People Are Heavily Buying into This Privacy Coin
While the rest of the market slumped deep in the red, Monero (XMR) was the only coin essentially in the green for several consecutive days.
This is partly a consequence of the large volume of Monero trading that happened over a 24 hour period at the start of this week.
People were heavily buying into the coin, which has gained a positive reputation due to its privacy features.
Monero obtained 98 percent of all transactions on Bisq, a decentralized cryptocurrency exchange platform that puts the main focus on its users' privacy.
Most of the traffic came from people who were exchanging BTC for XMR.
Despite a slight price fall over the week, Monero remains amongst the top 10 coins by market capitalization. The demand for both legal and illegal purposes of this cryptocurrency is enormous.
Tor Community Gets a Dedicated XMR Wallet
In other Monero news, the first XMR web-based wallet for Tor was released after a high demand within the Monero community.
This means that users can now anonymously reach their XMR wallet through the Tor network.
With Monero's positioning as the most popular privacy coin-especially among the dark web community-it was an anticipated move for XMRWallet, the developers of the platform.
This will make possible for users to have access to their crypto wallet anonymously on the Tor network.
The wallet's Tor-enabled service operates on a unique ".onion" address, xmrwalletdatuxds.onion; while the surface web service still operates from xmrwallet.com.
FBI Officials Reveal Criminals Prefer Cash over Bitcoin
Earlier this month, the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation Chief of Financial Crimes Steve D'Antuono revealed that criminals still favor cash over cryptocurrency when it comes to fraudulent transactions.
D'Antuono explained that despite the uptake of criminal activities related to cryptocurrency, in terms of percentage, they are relatively lower.
Nevertheless, the severity of these cases has caught the attention of the authorities.
The two main areas of this crime are the dark web and Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs), according to D'Antuono, while the intervention of the government official in this lies in the fact that the problem is quite severe, despite not being a quantitative one.
This year was filled with such cases, including the recent scandal with the Chinese hotel chain Huazhu, in which the data of 130 million people was being sold on the dark web, for the price of 8 Bitcoin.
Just recently, the FBI revealed that more than 130 crypto-related cases are being investigated by the agency.
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That's it for our summary of this week's major crypto news headlines. This is the 11th post in our new crypto news series. See previous installments here:
