- The US SEC has charged Binance and its CEO for violating Federal Securities laws.
- The crypto market has tumbled following this news with Bitcoin dropping below $26,000.
The United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has been on a trend of filing charges against cryptocurrency exchanges with the latest being Binance and its Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Changpeng “CZ” Zhao. Slowly but surely, this trend has impacted negatively on the broader crypto market, leaving the price of several digital assets including Bitcoin (BTC) at a staggering bearish point.
Current Bitcoin and Crypto Market Outlook
Before now, the largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization was trading above $27,000, especially for the greater part of last week.
Later, BTC traded for around $26,950 and according to Bob Baxley, the CTO of DeFi infrastructure platform Maverick Protocol, the leading token was in an accumulation phase. Only a few hours after SEC sued Binance, the price of BTC came crumbling down to around $25,400, indicating nearly a 5 percent decrease over the past 24 hours.
It is safe to say that the lawsuit against the leading digital asset service provider has raised the question of integrity and trust once again in the minds of investors, plus the regulator referred to most cryptocurrencies as unregistered securities.
The second prominent crypto Ethereum (ETH) was also affected by the turn of events. Ether slipped below $1,800, down by over 5 percent compared to its price on Sunday.
Other altcoins were not left out of the plunge. Binance exchange’s token BNB, and Solana native token SOL have both plummeted by up to 10 percent.
Cardano (ADA) and Polygon (MATIC) and even Elon Musk-linked memecoin DOGE are down by approximately 8%. Litecoin (LTC) which was equally making rounds recently has dipped by more than 9 percent.
At the time of this writing, Bitcoin is trading at $25,721.07, indicating a negligible recovery. The token has displayed outstanding resilience so far and may eventually break through in a bull run and strut toward attaining or surpassing the $30,000 mark by the end of this month.
SEC Sues Binance, CZ For Violating Securities Laws
As regards SEC’s issue with Binance, the crypto exchange was charged with violating Federal Securities laws. Based on the lawsuit, Binance, Binance.US, and CZ offered the public BNB token and Binance-linked BUSD stablecoin which were both referred to as securities. The lawsuit also alleged that Binance staking service violated securities laws.
Besides the core Binance-linked tokens, the markets regulator also designated Solana (SOL), Filecoin (FIL), and Decentraland (MANA) amongst others as securities.
According to the lawsuit, Binance claimed severally that it did not serve U.S. persons but it was not the case as the exchange made efforts to conceal the fact that most of its valuable U.S.-based clients were still using the platform. The SEC has reason to believe that this act was intentionally carried out to avoid regulation.
