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Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum's native token, Ether (ETH), started the week on a depressive note as investors braced themselves for a flurry of rate hike decisions from central banks, including the U.S. Federal Reserve and Bank of England.

Bitcoin price fails to hold $20,000

On Sep. 19, BTC's price has failed to regain the $20,000 psychological support zone. The BTC/USD pair slipped by 6.5% to around $18,250, while ETH dropped 4% to approximately $1,280.

Their gloomy performance came as a part of a broader decline that started in mid-August, wherein BTC and ETH wiped a total of 28% and 37% off their market valuation, respectively.

A 500 bps global rate hike ahead?

This week, the Fed and a number of its global peers will potentially attack rising inflation by further raising interest rates.

Data compiled by Bloomberg suggests that the U.S. central bank, alongside Sweden's Riksbank, the Swiss National Bank, Norway's Norges Bank, the Bank of England, and others, will raise lending rates by a combined 500 basis points, or 5%.

Post-Ethereum Merge proof-of-work (PoW) chain ETHW has moved to quell claims that it had suffered an on-chain replay attack over the weekend.

Smart contract auditing firm BlockSec flagged what it described as a replay attack that took place on Sept. 16, in which attackers harvested ETHW tokens by replaying the call data of Ethereum’s proof-of-stake (PoS) chain on the forked Ethereum PoW chain.

According to BlockSec, the root cause of the exploit was due to the fact that the Omni cross-chain bridge on the ETHW chain used old chainID and was not correctly verifying the correct chainID of the cross-chain message.

Ethereum’s Mainnet and test networks use two identifiers for different uses, namely, a network ID and a chain ID (chainID). Peer-to-peer messages between nodes make use of network ID, while transaction signatures make use of chainID. EIP-155 introduced chainID as a means to prevent replay attacks between the ETH and Ethereum Classic (ETC) blockchains.

BlockSec was the first analytics service to flag the replay attack and notified ETHW, which in turn quickly rebuffed initial claims that a replay attack had been carried out on-chain. ETHW made attempts to notify Omni Bridge of the exploit at the contract level:

The crypto market turmoil entered the third week of September as most of the cryptocurrencies started the week on a bearish note. The total crypto market cap dipped below $1 trillion again, with several cryptocurrencies recording a double-digit downfall over the past 24 hours.

The ongoing bearish turmoil has led to nearly half a billion in liquidations for the leverage crypto traders over the past 24 hours. Data from Coinglass highlight that 130,087 traders were liquidated with a total liquidations value of $431.51 million. Bitcoin (BTC) leverage traders lost $44.5 million, followed by Ether (ETH) traders with a total liquidation of $8.39 million.

Long traders made a significant chunk of losses on majority of the exchanges with the average difference between the amount of long and short liquidations being 10X.

The current market turmoil is being attributed to several macroeconomic factors, including the recently released consumer price index (CPI) data released on Sept. 13 that showed inflation is yet to cool off. BTC's price fell nearly $1,000 within minutes of the CPI data release. Since then, the market showed some will to move up over the weekend but saw another bloodbath earlier on Monday.

The higher CPI data is expected to be followed by a Fed rate hike in the upcoming meeting scheduled for Sept. 21. Market pundits have predicted that the rate hike could be the biggest in 40 years as a measure to control the soaring inflation.

Decentralized exchange (DEX) GMX has reportedly suffered a price manipulation exploit from an exploiter who managed to make off with around $565,000 from the AVAX/USD market.

The unidentified exploiter is understood to have capitalized on GMX’s “minimal spread” and “zero price impact” features to pull off the exploit, which impacted GLP token holders who provided liquidity in the form of AVAX (the Avalanche token) to GMX.

GMX confirmed the price manipulation exploit in a Sept. 18 post on Twitter, but stated that the AVAX/USD market would remain open despite imposing a $2 million cap on long positions and $1 million cap on short positions.

Head of Derivatives at Genesis Trading Joshua Lim was one of the first to analyze the exploit, stating that the exploiter “successfully extracted profits from GMX's AVAX/USD market by opening large positions at 0 slippage” before transferring the AVAX/USD to centralized exchanges at a slightly higher price.

Lim said this exploit method was repeated five times, with the first cycle taking effect at 01:15 UTC on Sept. 18. Each cycle transferred more than 200,000 AVAX tokens, (roughly $4-5 million per cycle) with the exploiter extracting about $565,000 in profit after paying spread to market makers on other exchanges.

Bitcoin (BTC) faces another week of “huge” macro announcements after the lowest weekly close since July.

After days of losses following the latest inflation data from the United States, BTC/USD, like altcoins and risk assets more broadly, has failed to recover.

The largest cryptocurrency has yet to flip $20,000 to convincing support, and as the third full week of September begins, the danger is once again that that level could function as resistance.

Bulls have plenty to worry about — the coming days will see the Federal Reserve decide on the next key rate hike, something that will affect the market far beyond mere sentiment.

In addition, the aftermath of the Ethereum (ETH) Merge continues to play out, while at defunct exchange Mt. Gox, reimbursements to creditors add another potential cloud to the Bitcoin price landscape.

Bitcoin (BTC) faces another week of “huge” macro announcements after the lowest weekly close since July.

After days of losses following the latest inflation data from the United States, BTC/USD, like altcoins and risk assets more broadly, has failed to recover.

The largest cryptocurrency has yet to flip $20,000 to convincing support, and as the third full week of September begins, the danger is once again that that level could function as resistance.

The bulls have plenty to worry about — the coming days will see the Federal Reserve decide on the next key rate hike, something that will affect the market far beyond mere sentiment.

In addition, the aftermath of the Ethereum Merge continues to play out, while at defunct exchange Mt. Gox, reimbursements to creditors add another potential cloud to the Bitcoin price landscape.