The SEC is at it again. It’s not massively surprising that the US regulator has the Binance exchange in its sights this time around. Nevertheless, the crypto market has reacted.

Bitcoin dropped off a US$26,800-high cliff in the wee hours this morning (AEST). Wee hours might be a doubly accurate term for some, as some trader panic seemed to ensue.

Bitcoin landed heavily on a branch around its 50-week moving average trendline of support, which is about US$25,500, and it’s proceeded to cling to that and stabilise ever since. It’s currently changing hands for about US$25,700.

Has the market overreacted somewhat? According to popular British crypto commentator and content creator Coin Bureau, aka Guy Turner, yes it has a tad…

So what’s happened exactly? Overnight, the United States Securities and Exchange Comimision, which has a hard-on for suppressing the crypto industry in the States, has filed a lawsuit against the Binance global exchange, its US platform and the firm’s CEO Changpeng Zhao (CZ).

The US regulator has pressed 13 charges against Binance, including unregistered offers and sales of various tokens, as well as Binance’s yield-earning and staking programs.

The tokens included in the filing are: BNB, BUSD, SOL, ADA, MATIC, FIL, ATOM, SAND, MANA, ALGO and AXS.

As our very own non-fungible Eddy Sunarto writes in his morning Market Highlights column:

“The SEC claimed that Binance and CZ misled investors about internal controls, secretly allowed customer funds to commingle, and diverted customer funds, “as they please”.

CZ’s response was fairly typical, intitially posting the number “4”, which means, according to the Binance CEO “Ignore FUD, fake news, attacks etc.”

He’ll have a hard time ignoring this attack from Gary Gensler and pals, though.

As for further commentary, here are the Aussie crypto education platform Collective Shift views: Ben Simpson…

And Matt Willemsen, who sees two outcomes:

“My unqualified prediction (not a lawyer etc): – This will end in a record civil penalty (e.g. fine) worth billions – If Binance is found to be fraudulent and insolvent (extremely unlikely), the crypto market and industry enters a nuclear winter and returns later this decade.”

Yeah, not loving that second part of the equation… but we agree it’s extremely unlikely.

Here’s Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson with a long take…

… which warns of a US government-led end goal that is an “agenda based CBDC partnered with a handful of massive banks and end-to-end control over every aspect of your financial life”.

A dystopia “that would make 1984 look like a vacation”.

Still, he ends his post with some soothing words…

“I’ll have more to say later, but will close with we are going to be fine. Everything’s alright and the future is bright for the industry.”

Phew, well that’s okay then. Back to scanning the next 1,000x memecoin…

 

Top 10 overview

With the overall crypto market cap at US$1.14 trillion, down about 5% since this time yesterday, here’s the current state of play among top 10 tokens – according to CoinGecko.

Source: GoinGecko.com

 Taking the hardest hits in the crypto majors today, are (unsurprisingly) the Binance exchange token BNB, -9.4%, along with Solana (SOL), -8.1%; Cardano (ADA), -7% and Elon Musk face Dogecoin (DOGE): -8.2%.

Uppers and downers

Some of the biggest 24-hour gainers and losers at press time. (Stats accurate at time of publishing, based on CoinGecko.com data.)

PUMPERS (11-100 market cap position)

• Kava (KAVA), (market cap: US$574 million) +4%

Small list, this one today, but this next one’s a little longer…

 

SLUMPERS

• Sui (SUI), (market cap: US$432 million) -15%

• Pepe (PEPE), (mc: US$437 million) -15%

• Terra Luna Classic (LUNC), (mc: US$539 million) -14%

• Render (RNDR), (mc: US$832 million) -14%

• Conflux (CFX), (mc: US$479 million) -13%

• ApeCoin (APE), (mc: US$1.05 billion) -13%

• Fantom (FTM), (mc: US$813 million) -11%

• The Sandbox (SAND), (mc: US$974 million) -11%

• Aptos (APT), (mc: US$1.6 billion) -11%

• Gala (GALA), (mc: US$636 million) -10%

 

Around the blocks: Apple unveils Vision Pro

Some pertinence and randomness that stuck with us on our morning moves through the Crypto Twitterverse.

Apple released “one more thing” overnight… it’s new mixed reality headset, dubbed the Apple Vision Pro…

… but nope, crypto metaverse tokens didn’t actually pump on the news. Was it a buy-the-rumour, sell-the-news event for crypto? Probably. Although, that water is muddied by the Binance-related market dump. 

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