Google Joins Facebook in Banning Cryptocurrency and ICO Ads: What It All Means

In 2017, the cryptocurrency market was virtually unstoppable. After beginning the year with a relatively small aggregate market cap of $17.7 billion, the combined value of digital currencies soared by almost $600 billion, pushing to $613 billion by year's end, an increase of more than 3,300%. Chances are decent that investors may never see such impressive one-year gains from an asset class ever again.

However, 2018 has presented some hurdles for cryptocurrencies. Regulatory concerns out of South Korea and China earlier this year wound up facilitating a decline in the aggregate virtual currency market cap from an all-time high of $835 billion to just $276 billion at its trough. In essence, the crypto market lost two-thirds of its value in roughly one month's time.

At the end of January, the largest social media network in the world announced that it would be banning all cryptocurrency and ICO ads. In the announcement, Facebook (NASDAQ: FB) product management director Rob Leathern said, "We've created a new policy that prohibits ads that promote financial products and services that are frequently associated with misleading or deceptive promotional practices, such as binary options, initial coin offerings and cryptocurrency." Considering that Facebook owns four of the top seven social media platforms by total users -- Facebook, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp -- this move to ban crypto ads was viewed as a major blow.