Investing.com - Cryptocurrencies gained ground on Wednesday, as Google (NASDAQ:GOOGL) moved to partially reverse its ban on digital currency ads.
Bitcoin increased 1.01% to $6,491.10 on the Bitfinex exchange, as of 9:46 AM ET (13:46 GMT).
Cryptocurrencies overall were higher, with the coin market cap of total market capitalization at $214 billion at the time of writing compared to $206 billion on Tuesday.
Ethereum,or Ether, rose 1.57% to $213.26 and Litecoin was at $57.179, up 3.37%.
XRP surged 16.60% to $0.54522 despite news that Jed McCaleb, co-founder of the coin, had accelerated his selling of the digital currency.
McCaleb left the company a few years ago to build Stellar, an open-source alternative to XRP.
Meanwhile, Google partially reversed its cryptocurrency advertising ban, enabling government-registered trading platforms to promote their companies in the U.S. and Japan starting in October.
The tech giant imposed a global ban on all types of crypto-related ads in June.
In other news, crypto mining malware increased in the second quarter of the year, rising 86% quarter on quarter, research from cybersecurity provider McAfee found.
“A few years ago, we wouldn’t think of internet routers, video-recording devices, and other Internet of Things devices as platforms for crypto mining because their CPU speeds were too insufficient to support such productivity,” said McAfee lead scientist Christiaan Beek.
“If I were a cybercriminal who owns a botnet of 100,000 such IoT devices, it would cost me next to nothing financially to produce enough cryptocurrency to create a new, profitable revenue stream,” Beek said.
Cybersecurity is one of the top threats to digital currencies as the alternative coins become more mainstream.