Investing.com – Cryptocurrencies prices plunged on Wednesday, with Ethereum and Litecoin down more than 7%. Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) co-founder Steve Wozniak’s comment received some attention as he said the hype around blockchain signals a bubble.
Bitcoin was trading at $6,064.7 by 12:22AM ET (04:22GMT) on the Bitfinex exchange, down 2.9% over the previous 24 hours.
Ethereum, the world’s second largest cryptocurrency by market cap, plunged 7.1% to $428.42 on the Bitfinex exchange.
Ripple’s XRP token fell 5.3% to $0.45487 on the Poloniex exchange.
Meanwhile, Litecoin slumped 8.0% to $75.68.
Steve Wozniak, who founded Apple with Steve Jobs, said on Tuesday that he feels blockchain technology has real potential because it is “decentralized and totally trustworthy,” but could take longer than many had anticipated to catch up to its hype.
“It was a bubble, and I feel that way about blockchain,” Wozniak said at the NEX technology conference in New York.
“If you look now you say all that internet stuff happened, we got it, it just took a while,” Wozniak said. “It doesn’t change in a day, a lot of the blockchain ideas that are really good by coming out early they can burn themselves out by not being prepared to be stable in the long run.”
On Monday, Alibaba’s chairman Jack Ma said Bitcoin could be a potential bubble, and warned that it may be driven by torrid speculation.
Crypto prices were under pressure in recent weeks, with Bitcoin falling 70% from its December high just short of $20,000.
Elsewhere, reports on Wednesday said Facebook (NASDAQ:FB) is reversing its ban on crypto advertisements and would allow advertisers that are preapproved by the social network to promote crypto services.
Ads promoting binary options and ICOs, initial coin offerings, are still banned.
Facebook banned all crypto ads in january to prevent exchanges from promoting “financial products and services frequently associated with misleading or deceptive promotional practices.”