After the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) of the United States filed a lawsuit against cryptocurrency exchange Binance and its founder, Changpeng Zhao, alleging that Binance offered unregistered crypto derivatives in the United States, bitcoin began the Asian business day down 3.8% at $26,958.
Binance’s BNB coin is down 5.9% to $308 on the allegations.
When the CFTC delivered this blow, the question on the minds of the traders is whether or not Binance will continue to operate as a going concern. Yet, in February, the exchange stated that it is prepared to pay monetary fines in order to "make apologies" for sins that have been committed in the past. On the one hand, Binance's CEO referred to the CFTC's complaint as "unexpected and regrettable."
At the same time, there is considerable discussion regarding the extent to which traders are brushing off the claims made by the CFTC and the degree to which bitcoin is able to react to news despite there being a lack of liquidity in the market.
During a recent visit on CoinDesk TV, Dan Gunsberg, co-founder of the Solana-based derivatives liquidity protocol Hxro, stated that "when you have limited liquidity, you tend to get extremely calm markets." "You have these spikes in the market and these liquidity vacuums," which are instances in which items move to a new price and then promptly settle back down to their previous level.
While the Commodity Futures Trading Commission is investigating Binance, the narrative of decentralization moves forward. In the past twenty-four hours, the token of the decentralized derivatives exchange GMX has increased in value by 4%. This increase is almost identical to the rise in value that tokens of decentralized ether liquid staking platforms experienced in February, when the SEC began cracking down on staking.
Yet, simply because something is decentralized does not mean that regulators are precluded from pursuing it.