These are the unexpected winners of the cryptocurrency craze Friday, 9 Jun 2017 | 5:55 PM ET | 01:40Bitcoin suddenly plummeted Monday, after jumping over the weekend to an all-time high.The decline came as major U.S. technology stocks fell for a second straight day on concerns that the sector has risen to unsustainable levels.At least two major bitcoin exchanges also had problems Monday."Coinbase is currently experiencing high traffic & customers have receive(d) a 'service unavailable' message when visiting Coinbase.com," according to a statement on the exchange's status website dated June 12 at 2:08 p.m. ET.The exchange accounts for nearly 17 percent of U.S. dollar-denominated bitcoin trade volume, according to Cryptocompare, and had reported outages in late May amid "unprecedented traffic and trading."The BTC-E exchange tweeted at 2:06 p.m., ET, that it was hit by distributed denial-of-service attacks, or DDoS.
Twitter Ads info and privacyThe website for BTC-e was also down as of 2:26 p.m. The exchange accounts for about 6 percent of U.S. dollar-denominated bitcoin trade, according to Cryptocompare.
Bitcoin climbed above the psychologically key $3,000 level Sunday to hit a record high of $3,041.36, according to CoinDesk. The gains were helped by news that several major Chinese bitcoin exchanges were allowing withdrawals of the currency after a monthslong hiatus.However, a sharp move lower Monday afternoon ET illustrated how volatile the cryptocurrency can be.Bitcoin suddenly dropped more than 16 percent on the day to $2,532.87 before recovering slightly, CoinDesk data showed. The digital currency was last trading near $2,576.46.Even with Monday's decline, bitcoin remained more than 150 percent higher for the year so far. The currency first topped the $2,000 level on May 20, less than four weeks ago.Watch: Bitcoin bulls run wild as it tops $3,000