Investing.com - The price of digital currency bitcoin, as well as the other major cryptocurrencies was lower on Sunday as a recent slew of negative headlines continued to weigh on investor sentiment.
Bitcoin was trading at $8,568 on the Bitfinex exchange, down around 7% for the day and not far from Friday’s five-week low of $8351.
Prices came under pressure on Wednesday following reports that the Hong Kong-based Binance cryptocurrency exchange was having problems executing orders.
In a statement on Thursday, Binance said it had halted withdrawals after experiencing what it called “a large scale phishing and stealing attempt” and said no funds were stolen.
Separately Wednesday, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission released an investor alert about the risks of using of cryptocurrency exchanges.
The SEC said that exchanges offering trading of "digital assets that are securities" would have to register with the agency.
“Investors should not assume the trading protocols meet the standards of an SEC-registered national securities exchange,” the agency said.
The developments underlined concerns over the risks to users of cryptocurrency exchanges in the wake of a hack on Japanese exchange Coincheck in January in which around $530 million of digital tokens was stolen.
Japan’s financial regulator issued punishment notices to several cryptocurrency exchanges on Thursday, and suspended operations at two exchanges for a month, amid a crackdown in regulatory scrutiny following the hack.
Other major cryptocurrencies also traded lower, with Ethereum, the world’s second largest cryptocurrency by market cap, losing around 5.8% to trade at $682.
The third largest cryptocurrency Ripple was down about 5.6% to $0.76.