Today In Cryptocurrency: Kraken Pulls Out Of Japan, Pornhub Accepts Verge Currency

After a slow start to the week on Monday, cryptocurrencies traded mostly flat on Tuesday, with mixed returns among major currencies over the past 24 hours.

Headlines

Pornhub made a big splash Tuesday by announcing it has stared accepting cryptocurrency as a payment option. Pornhub joined adult websites Brazzers and Nutaku in accepting Verge cryptocurrency, news that sent Verge prices higher by 4 percent.

Cryptocurrency exchange Kraken, which CoinMarketCap lists as the 10th largest cryptocurrency exchange in the word by trading volume, has announced it will be withdrawing its services from Japan due to the rising costs of operating there. The San Francisco-based Kraken said the withdrawal would only impact Japanese residents and not Japanese customers living outside of Japan. It also said it would be open to returning to the Japanese market in the future, a market which the website CryptoCompare recently said accounted for nearly 60 percent of all global bitcoin trading.

As cryptocurrencies continue to battle to gain mainstream acceptance, digital wallet Blockchain announced the hiring of former Goldman Sachs head of institutional wealth services Breanne Madigan to aid in the company’s institutional sales push. Institutional investors haven’t dived into the cryptocurrency markets as aggressively as many traders had anticipated following the launch of bitcoin futures trading in 2017.

Price Action

The Bitcoin Investment Trust GBTC closed at $12.43, down 5.7 percent.

Here’s how several top crypto investments fared on Monday (price as of 3:45 p.m. ET and reflects the previous 24 hours):

• Bitcoin declined 1.2 percent to $7,910;
• Ethereum declined 0.3 percent to $504;
• Ripple gained 0.3 percent to $0.659;
• Bitcoin Cash gained 0.07 percent to $759;
• Litecoin gained 5 percent $133.

Here are the three cryptocurrencies with at least a $1 million market cap that have made the biggest gains over the past 24 hours:

• Virtacoin - $2 million market cap, 417 percent gain.
• SuperCoin - $1.3 million market cap, 257.7 percent gain.
• InflationCoin - $2.7 million market cap, 216.3 percent gain.

Here are the three cryptocurrencies that were hit hardest in the past 24 hours:

• BuzzCoin - $1.6 million market cap, 33.9 percent loss.
• KiloCoin - $7.4 million market cap, 29.4 percent loss.
• DNotes- $5.8 million market cap, 28.7 percent loss.

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