On January 8th CoinMarketCap implemented a decision to remove several SK crypto exchanges from its altcoin price listings, causing the market as whole to take a big dip. Most strongly affected was Ripple\'s XRP coin, which had been enjoying a massive bull run through the holiday period. Ripple saw an immediate dramatic reverse after the announcement was made, with a price drop of nearly 30% and over $20bn lost in its market capitalisation.

 The South Korean exchanges which were removed were Korbit, Coinone and Bithumb, which is the second largest trading exchange in the world by volume. Ripple enjoys a particularly high volume of trade on the South Korean exchanges, which very likely contributed to its recent popularity. In the New Year, XRP overtook ETH on CoinMarketCap rankings, putting it in second place after Bitcoin on the overall crypto market, but this latest move put Ether back in front of Ripple.

 CoinMarketCap compiles data from the numerous large global exchanges in order to produce an average cryptocurrency price list. Altcoins (XRP, ZDR, ETH, BTC, etc) are typically traded on South Korean exchanges at a higher price than on most other global exchanges, in some cases at over a dollar more. CoinMarketCap explained in their tweeted announcement that this extreme price divergence was the reason for SK\'s exclusion, because it threw the averages off and limited their opportunities for arbitrage.