The weekend in the red: why the crypto market is falling

Altcoin Depression

All last week, crypto was attacked by the SEC, but the market behaved surprisingly stable. But the collapse did happen — the market started falling from Friday night to Saturday, when major financial markets are closed and most traders are out of work.

The first to fall were the “toxic assets” that had previously been marked as securities by the SEC. Solana, Matic, Cardano, Filecoin, and Sand lost more than 20% in just a few hours. At the same time, BTC was down only 3.5%, and ETH lost just over 5%.

The price of Bitcoin went below $26,000 again. The capitalization of all digital assets is dangerously close to the important psychological value of $1 trillion; the last time the figure was below this value was in September 2022, in the midst of the crypto winter.

PoS altcoin sell-offs are the reason for the drop

• The announced sell-off of Cardano, Matic, and Solana (and other assets that the SEC called securities) from Robinhood is starting to put pressure on the market; sellers have started to exit from these altcoins. Robinhood owns 1.3 billion altcoins, of which 583 million are in these three cryptocurrencies.
• In light of all the risks to U.S. investors, the Scimitar Capital fund said it has made a strategic decision to liquidate all of its cryptocurrency assets. Late Friday night, this fund sold $2 billion worth of altcoins.
• TVL in DeFi fell sharply by 8.97% last week, from $47.12 billion to $42.89 billion. Over five days, the loss amounted to about $4.2 billion. Most of the losses came on the last day of the week, as the overall market capitalization and prices of large coins fell dramatically.

Binance under extreme pressure

Binance had a net outflow of $3.37 billion in the last 7 days. CZ reassures the community that this is normal during volatility. To compare, during the FTX crash, Binance withdrew about $7 billion in just 1 day. However, if Binance keeps losing liquidity at this rate, the situation may become critical in a week or two.

Also, TrueUSD temporarily stopped issuing new #TUSD because this stablecoin partially lost its peg to the dollar. Considering that after the $BUSD scandal, Binance made a bet on TrueUSD implementation (creating many trading pairs with TUSD), everything that is going on is very alarming.

The overall situation with Binance is very well seen on the chart of its exchange token — it has been rapidly losing its market value in the last 7 days since the regulators began attacking:

What do we think about this?

Earlier, Cardana’s founder accused the U.S. authorities of a coordinated attack on the world’s leading crypto exchanges in an attempt to artificially crash the crypto market. Recall that in spring, the US authorities launched a similar series of attacks on banks serving crypto exchanges, which caused bank panic, after which the unsuccessful attack was stopped.

On Friday, we reported that, according to expert analysis, Crypto.com, a major exchange, would be the next likely target. Today it became known that Crypto.com is hastily shutting down its service for institutional clients in the United States, probably acting proactively.

To all appearances, the closer it is to July, the tougher the SEC’s actions will be. After all, the U.S. Federal Reserve is launching its government digital currency, Fednow, in July. If Cardano’s founder is right in understanding the logic of the market and the authorities are really clearing the way for their CBDC, then the peak of the confrontation with the crypto community is yet to come.

Two important events tomorrow

• The other important thing is that tomorrow will be the US inflation data for May. This figure will play a key role in the Fed’s rate decision (the meeting itself will be held on June 14). If the rate is left unchanged for the first time since March 2022, that is positive for the markets, and it will give a respite to the crypto market. But if inflation data comes out worse than forecast, financial pressure on the crypto market will increase.
• Also tomorrow, there will be hearings in the US Congress on crypto regulation, and senators will discuss the destruction the SEC has made in the crypto market. The regulator is objectively damaging the U.S. position in the digital industry, causing a huge outflow of assets.

Both of these events can trigger new volatility in the market, so we recommend caution, especially if you are using margin trading.