Investing.com - Cryptocurrencies were trading mostly lower across the board on Tuesday as traders took profit after the recent rebound in the last week and continued to evaluate developments with regard to regulation of the digital assets.
As recently as last Friday, the New Jersey Bureau of Securities said it banned Bitcoin-related investment Bitstrade from offering its products in New Jersey.
“We want to make sure that investors tempted to cash in on the cryptocurrency rage aren’t being lured into sending funds to an anonymous Internet entity without knowing where the funds are going or how they’ll be used,” said New Jersey Attorney General Gurbir Grewal in announcing the emergency order against Bitstrade.
According to the regulator, Bitstrade had been offering its products without a proper registration with the New Jersey government.
Elsewhere, cryptocurrency traders were reportedly preparing to launch lawsuit against Tokyo-based Coincheck later this week.
The traders are likely to file a second lawsuit at the end of the month to claim for damagers over the heist, according to the report released late Monday.
Among growing concern over the security of digital exchanges, Coincheck was attacked by hackers last month and has lost $530 million in digital money. The exchange froze all withdrawals of yen and digital currencies following the theft, but has since resumed yen-withdrawals, according to its Twitter account.
It was also reported late Monday that Coincheck is expected to file a report with regulators on the hacking sometime this week.
Bitcoin, the largest cryptocurrency by market cap, was off 2.3% at $8528.80 by 6:46AM ET (11:46GMT) Tuesday on the Bitifinex exchange, paring its gains in the last 7 days to roughly 29%.
Bitcoin hit a low of $6,000 dollars on February 6 as fears over regulation struck the digital asset which had hit a high of nearly $20,000 in December of last year amid the hype for cryptocurrency investment.
Total cryptocurrency market cap was at around $409 billion on Tuesday, well off the level of more than $800 billion seen at the beginning of this year.
Elsewhere in cryptocurrencies on Tuesday, by descending market cap, Ethereum lost 3.5% to $829.96, but held onto gains of about 30% since a week ago, Ripple slumped 8.2% to $0.98078, while Bitcoin offshoot Bitcoin Cash fell 5.2% to 1,210.10, diminishing its weekly gain to a still solid 45%.