Bitcoin fell nearly 6% and Ether lost 5% in a broad market drop of all 10 major non-stable cryptocurrencies on Tuesday morning in Asia after the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) sued cryptocurrency exchange Binance and its founder Changpeng Zhao on charges of securities violations. The BNB token issued by Binance was the biggest loser with a drop of more than 10% in the last 24 hours.
Top 10 Crypto Slides
Bitcoin fell 5.66% in the past 24 hours to hit $25,730 as of 7:10 a.m. HK, bringing losses over the past seven days to 7.23%, according to data from CoinMarketCap.
Ether fell 4.91% over the same period to hit US$1,808 and posted a weekly loss of 4.56%.
BNB has slipped 10.21% to US$275.17 in the past 24 hours, losing 11.61% over the past week.
The SEC filed 13 charges against Binance on Monday, alleging the exchange made unregistered and illegal bids and sales of its BNB and BUSD tokens. The SEC also alleged that Binance failed to register Binance.com as an exchange or brokerage clearing agency.
In response to the SEC lawsuit, Binance said in a statement Tuesday that it intends to defend its platform “vigorously.”
“The SEC’s refusal to productively engage with us is just another example of the Commission’s misguided and conscious refusal to provide much-needed clarification and guidance to the digital asset industry,” said Binance.
Cryptocurrencies traded on the Binance exchange, including BNB, BUSD, Solana, Cardano’s ADA, Polygon’s MATIC, are securities and require registration and regulation, according to the SEC lawsuit.
Solana has fallen 9.52% in the past 24 hours, with ADA down 7.73% and MATIC down 7.64%.
“Total crypto market capitalization is down,” said Justin d’Anethan, head of APAC business development at Keyrock, a Belgium-based crypto market maker. Forkast Tuesday morning in Asia. “Just because the news isn’t a shock doesn’t mean it’s been considered, apparently.”
In a Monday TweeterSEC Chairman Gary Gensler said the Zhao and Binance entities engaged in “a vast web of deception, conflicts of interest, lack of disclosure, and calculated evasion of the law.”
In response, Zhao tweeted: “I wonder if he ever reads the comments under his post, consumers that he is [supposed] protect.”
According to d’Anethan, the SEC lawsuit comes as no surprise given that the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission previously filed a lawsuit against Binance for alleged violations of derivatives trading rules. .
However, traders view the lawsuit as extremely bearish and it is shaking the market, he said.
Total cryptocurrency market capitalization fell 4.6% to US$1.09 trillion in the 24 hours to 8:30 a.m. in Hong Kong, while trading volume jumped 118% to more than 48 billion US dollars.
Apple headset shakes up Binance in the NFT market
Indices are indirect measures of the performance of the global NFT market. They are operated by CryptoSlam, a sister company of Forkast.News under the Forkast.Labs umbrella.
In the non-fungible token (NFT) market, the Forkast 500 NFT index edged down 0.17% to 3,295.91 within 24 hours of 9:20 a.m. in Hong Kong.
The SEC’s lawsuit against Binance “hasn’t impacted NFTs yet, but it likely will,” Yehudah Petscher, NFT strategist at Forkast Labs, the parent company of Forkast.News, said on Tuesday. “It’s already had an impact on crypto, and generally NFTs are a bit behind.”
In the United States overnight, Apple Inc. unveiled its highly anticipated Vision Pro mixed reality headset. Although priced at US$3,499, the headset has the NFT industry excited about its potential application in metaverse developments.
“Apple’s headset is really all the NFT spaces were talking about today and rightly so,” Petscher said. “Really, this is the biggest thing to happen to NFTs since CryptoPunks, even though Apple didn’t mention NFTs or the Metaverse once in their Vision Pro reveal.”
Sébastien Borget, co-founder and chief operating officer of decentralized gaming giant The Sandbox, said in an interview with Forkast that Apple’s headphones “open up a great field of opportunity” for metaverse developments.
“This is the most likely to be a game-changer of anything we’ve seen so far in the past five years in this space…allowing people to interact with their virtual assets in the physical world. .”
NFT sales on Ethereum increased by 5.64% in the past 24 hours to $25.75 million and gained 90.84% in the past week. Sales on the Bitcoin network soared 4.17% to $3.16 million, but saw a weekly decline of 11.87%.
Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) and Azuki remained the two best-selling Ethereum collections. BAYC had the highest sales in the past 24 hours at $7.26 million, followed by Azuki’s $2.65 million.
DMarket, a collection of gaming NFTs based on the Mythos blockchain, was the third best-selling collection in the past 24 hours with an 11.49% increase in sales to $1.52 million.
Coinbase shares affected by Binance
Shares of Coinbase, the largest crypto trading platform in the United States, fell 9.05% on Monday following the SEC lawsuit against Binance. Shares of MicroStrategy, the world’s largest Bitcoin-holding company, fell 8.53%.
US stock futures also fell slightly at 10:00 a.m. in Hong Kong. Dow Jones Industrial Average futures fell 0.05%, S&P 500 futures fell 0.04%. Nasdaq futures fell 0.09%.
Coinbase has its own legal battle with the SEC. In March, the SEC alleged that Coinbase violated investor protection laws and threatened to take enforcement action against the exchange. Coinbase argued in April that the SEC’s decision appeared to undermine its own role as gatekeeper to companies registering to sell shares to the public.
Coinbase also asked a court to compel the SEC to publicly respond to the exchange’s July 2022 petition asking for clearer crypto regulatory guidelines.
On the regulatory front, Paul Grewal, Chief Legal Officer of Coinbase, tweeted on Monday that he will testify before the House Agriculture Committee on Tuesday about the need for clear crypto rules and the draft digital asset market structure discussion released Friday.
“The United States is lagging behind”, Grewal tweeted. “We cannot afford to ignore crypto while other markets take advantage of our absence, developing rules and regulations that allow the industry to thrive and risk sending jobs, investments and a technological leadership abroad.”
(Updates with the equity section.)