Ethereum’s price briefly collapsed from $100 to $13 on Coinbase Pro

Another day, another mad cryptocurrency anomaly. For a brief moment, the price of Ethereum on Coinbase Pro (formerly known as GDAX ) collapsed from almost $100 down to a measly $13.

The incident took place at around 6 AM UTC. Since then, the price of Ethereum – the third largest cryptocurrency by market cap after Bitcoin and Ripple – has bounced back to an average trading rate of about $97.

Indeed, it only took moments before its value climbed back from $13 to $97.

For the record, it appears the anomaly solely affected the Ethereum price on Coinbase Pro’s USDC markets. For those unfamiliar, USDC is a dollar-pegged cryptocurrency, issued by fintech giant Circle (with some funding from mining behemoth Bitmain).

Shocked traders instantly took to social media to share screenshots of the unusual activity, with many left dumbfounded by the occurrence.

Hard Fork has since corroborated the crash indeed took place. Coinbase has yet to address the incident on its official channels.

Cryptocurrency, Ethereum, and flash crashes

This is hardly the first time the cryptocurrency market has seen such unexpected drops in price, more commonly known as “flash crashes.”

In fact, this is at least the second time Ethereum has been subject to a flash crash.

Back in 2017, the price of the popular cryptocurrency, co-founded by Vitalik Buterin, collapsed from over $300 to just 10 ¢. As with today’s incident, its price swiftly recovered, even though it had much higher to climb.

Hard Fork has reached out to Coinbase for comment on this bizarre occurrence. Unfortunately, no representatives were available at the time of writing. We’ll update this piece accordingly if we hear back.

Update 21:40 UTC, December 6: Coinbase has addressed the issue on Twitter – and the exchange claims that its systems had been operating as planned, without any unexpected behavior. Here’s what it said:

The plot thickens…

Update 22:35 UTC, December 6: Assuming the unusual trading activity was a manually placed sell order (and not a trading irregularity triggered by a system failure – or bots) as Coinbase indicates in its response, it is possible the unexpected drop in price wasn’t caused by a “flash crash.”

Sharp swings in price – like the one observed on Coinbase Pro today – could indeed be triggered by the actions of traders, people familiar with the matter told Hard Fork. This means that it is entirely possible some unfortunate user made an awfully bad trade – and the market swiftly responded to it.

Whatever the case is though, that is one awfully bizarre occurrence.

We’ve asked Coinbase for an additional clarification, and will update this piece accordingly if we hear back.

Additional reporting by Mix

Fake Electrum blames real Electrum for ‘ruining its reputation’ — pulls exit scam

We had cautioned our readers last month about Electrum Pro being a scam — sadly, we’re now seeing the worst possible outcome from it.

Electrum Pro, an impostor of Bitcoin wallet service Electrum, has shut down its website in what seems to be an exit scam.

The scammers were using the om domain variation of the real Electrum’s rg domain, to trick its users into believing that they were in fact using an upgraded version of the service.

As of press time, Electrumom just shows one message from its team that puts the blame on Electrum for ruining their reputation:

While scams are uncovered in the cryptocurrency space almost every day, this might be the first time where the scammers are pointing the finger at the very company they were impersonating.

The message is signed by one Lucas Lofgren, whose information and connections to electrumom can’t be found on LinkedIn or elsewhere on the web. The website’s WHOIS information is not public, so information about the domain’s legal owner cannot be discovered.

The move follows an investigation by Electrum, which shared a detailed proof about Electrum Pro being a Bitcoin stealing malware two days ago. Electrum Pro website was shown to include code meant for extracting the seed keys that their users used to access their wallets.

Some Reddit users who claim to have fallen for the scam, are reporting that their Electrumom wallets are being emptied out without their knowledge.

Phishing attacks in the space have been on the rise lately, in various forms including fake Android apps on Google Play Store , DNS attacks , and misleading messages shared by impostors on social networks .

Cryptocurrency owners need to take extra care in ensuring that they are not falling for these scams, and make sure they verify that they are on the right domain name or app before using the service.

Right now, without government regulations to keep people safe, your best bet is to research the service you plan to use on social networks, and in cryptocurrency forums, such as BitcoinTalk and Reddit , before investing.

Samsung could be developing its own blockchain phone

There might be another name joining HTC and Sirin Labs as makers of blockchain smartphones, and it’s one of the world’s largest phone manufacturers, Samsung.

Earlier this week, Samsung submitted three European trademark requests for blockchain-based smartphone features, spotted by Galaxy Club . The three trademarks are named as “ Blockchain KeyStore ,” “ Blockchain key box ,” and “ Blockchain Core .”

These names obviously leave little to the imagination. The trademarks are potentially alluding to forms of private or public key storage. Perhaps Samsung is working on a form of hardware wallet to be built into its future devices.

Indeed, the trademark documents do state that the trademarks will apply to “ Smartphones; Software applications for use with mobile devices; Computer software platforms; Application software ”

Sadly though, as these are just trademark requests and not patents, the documents do not go into any further detail. We will have to wait to see exactly how these trademarks are brought to life.

It would seem that Samsung are well aware of the need to securely store cryptocurrency and blockchain encryption keys.

Earlier this year, Samsung claimed that its smartphones had the best security for storing cryptocurrency. Naturally, a number of industry experts disagreed, but it seems now that Samsung are intent on buidling on the functionality of its current devices.