Investing.com – Cryptocurrency prices gained on Wednesday, with Ethereum and Ripple jumping more than 7%. Reports that six Japanese companies are planning to launch cryptocurrency exchanges received some attention.
Bitcoin was trading at $7,474.5 by 7:00PM ET (23:00 GMT) on the Bitfinex exchange, up 4.4% over the previous 24 hours.
Ethereum, the world’s second largest cryptocurrency by market cap, gained 7.9% at $563.27 on the Bitfinex exchange.
Ripple’s XRP token climbed 7.0% higher to $0.59631 on the Poloniex exchange.
Meanwhile, Litecoin added 6.2% to $119.28.
Six Tokyo-listed exchanges, including Money Forward, Drecom, Yamane Medical Corporation, Adways, Avex and Daiwa Securities Group, revealed their plans to enter the crypto exchanges business for the first time, according to reports.
The six corporations will join other public companies in Japan that previously said they are launching crypto exchanges, such as SBI Group, Line Corp, and Yahoo! Japan.
Japan currently has 16 completely licensed crypto-exchanges, with another 8 applications of exchanges being reviewed by FSA, Japan’s Financial Service Agency.
Elsewhere, a new crypto-mining malware called the “XBooster” used Amazon’s cloud to hijack computers, and has infected machines using Windows operating systems to harvest approximately $100,000 worth of the virtual coins monero, according to reports, which further suggested that popular cryptos like Bitcoin has become far too difficult for hackers to mine, so instead they are targeting less widely used virtual coins.