The US Commodities Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) filed a lawsuit against Binance and its founder Changpeng Zhao on Tuesday, alleging that Binance traded unregistered cryptocurrency futures in the US, sending the price of bitcoin and other popular crypto tokens substantially lower.
Also, the concerns of a banking crisis have subsided, which has lowered interest in crypto assets. Yet, the decentralisation story continues across the markets. On the other hand, liquidity concerns remain high in the risky asset markets.
Bitcoin saw some strong profit booking in the last 24 hours as the largest crypto token fell over 3 per cent and slipped below the USD27,000-mark. Even though Ethereum, its biggest rival, lost more than 3% of its value, it managed to hold the $1,700 levels. However, the altcoin market was suffering greatly.
Barring the US dollar-pegged USD Coin and XRP, which rose 5 per cent, all other top crypto tokens were trading sharply lower on Tuesday. Following a 6% decline in each of Litecoin and BNB, Polygon and Solana both fell by 5%. Avalanche and Polkadot both had a 3% decline.
The global cryptocurrency market cap was trading significantly lower at USD1.13 trillion, dropping as much as 3 per cent in the last 24 hours. The total trading volume, however, increased significantly and increased by more than 34% to USD43.04 billion.
According to Parth Chaturvedi, Crypto Ecosystem Lead at CoinSwitch, these individual token prices have traded lower even as the broader markets have continued to rise due to claims of securities fraud against Justin Sun's Tron and BitTorrent as well as an SEC subpoena for the SUSHI founders.
"The Ripple against SEC lawsuit, where Ripple supporters are expressing confidence that XRP won't be deemed a security by the courts, provided the week's only bright spot. In terms of notable advances, last week saw the launch of the zkEVM era after Matter Labs' opening of their zkSync Era to all users. Polygon will be launching its own zkEVM solution this week," he said.
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