Bitcoin Suddenly Drops 90% on Binance Futures
BTC/USDT Perpetual Contracts on Binance Futures suddenly dropped from $27,125 to $2,707, losing 90% of its value. The shocking decline left market participants confused; however, this seems to be a display error on Binance and investor orders are not affected. Binance CEO also confirmed this issue.
Binance’s liquid staked Ether jumps to $1.2B in TVL after sudden $500M inflow
WBETH (Wrapped Beacon ETH) is a wrapped version of BETH, used to replace ETH when users stake ETH through Binance. WBETH was launched by Binance in April 2023 and since then, the exchange has minted WBETH and burned BETH. The mint-burn ratio between BETH and WBETH is 1:1 but Binance recently did not do so.
On-chain data shows that a total of 318,180 WBETH, worth more than $500 million, were minted by Binance over the past two weekends. These tokens correspond to 50% of the total supply of BETH. They then landed on a crypto address labeled as “Binance 8”, a cold wallet where the exchange holds user’s assets.
Yet, there was no burning activity on the blockchain until it was reminded by Conor Grogan, Director of Product and Sales at Coinbase. Binance explained in a social media post that the transactions were part of the exchange’s previously announced action to gradually convert the original Binance-issued staked ether (BETH) tokens to WBETH. However, Binance’s vague move has sparked controversy.
Binance fully exists to Russia
Binance has agreed to sell the entirety of its Russia business to CommEX. All assets of existing Russian users are safe and the off-boarding process will take up to one year.
“As we look toward the future, we recognise that operating in Russia is not compatible with Binance’s compliance strategy,” said Noah Perlman, Binance’s Chief Compliance Officer. “We remain confident in the long-term growth of the Web3 industry around the world and will focus our energy on the 100+ other countries in which we operate.”
Celestia announces airdrop
Celestia, a modular blockchain project, recently announced their latest airdrop. According to the announcement, there are approximately 7,579 developers and 576,653 on-chain wallet addresses eligible to receive Celestia’s airdrop. The project took a snapshot on January 1, 2023 to determine those eligible to participate in the airdrop.
Eligibility criteria:
- Developers and contributors for Celestia
- Most active users on Ethereum Layer-2 platforms
- Staked and used IBC relayer on Cosmos Hub and Osmosis networks
Investors are selling Bitcoin to focus on these altcoins
Crypto analytics platform Santiment reported that Bitcoin’s ratio of discussions has hit its lowest level in the past 3 months. Meanwhile, traders are turning their attention to altcoins. Traders seem to be afraid of missing out on opportunities to invest in small-cap crypto projects and have sold Bitcoin to focus on these altcoins.
Santiment revealed that small projects such as Loom Network (LOOM), Cream Finance (CREAM), and Solaris (SXP) have gained a lot of attention, showing interest in these coins of the market. As a result, these tokens have seen a significant increase in price over the past few days. LOOM surged more than 144% to $0.11, CREAM increased 65% to $17, SXP up 2.5% to $0.28 in just 1 week.
Besides LOOM, CREAM, and SXP, other altcoins like Frontier (FRONT), ImmutableX (IMX), and Chainlink (LINK) are also performing better than the majority of the crypto market.
Memecoin PEPE awakens after Wintermute’s move
PEPE price increased by 20%, peaking at $0.00000071 from September 22-23. Data from Coinglass shows that during that time, PEPE’s open interest (OI) increased significantly to $13.92 million, up 110% from the previous level of $12.57 million.
An increase in open interest – the total of all short and long positions – means more money is entering the market, which is a positive sign. That raises the likelihood that the current trend will continue. The fact that more people are accepting job openings than are resigning further suggests that token holders have a renewed interest in the PEPE coin.
Santiment data showed increased activity on metrics of exchange inflows, outflows, and the number of whale transactions with more than $100,000 in their accounts. Wintermute Trading, a major market maker in the crypto market, transferred 8.3 billion PEPE worth $5.5 million to centralized exchanges on September 23. However, this is not necessarily a sign of PEPE growth.
MicroStrategy buys another $147M in Bitcoin
Billionaire Michael Saylor’s MicroStrategy said the company spent $147.3 million to buy 5,445 Bitcoin with an average purchase price of $27,053. In an interview with Bloomberg on June 13, Michael Saylor said recent enforcement actions by US regulators have made it clear that the crypto industry is destined to be rationalized down to a bitcoin-focused industry. It is the only cryptocurrency not on the list of tokens working as securities of the SEC.
Saylor asserts that Bitcoin will rise to $250,000, 10 times its current price. The large price increase will be sparked by cryptocurrency exchanges.
Vitalik Buterin is accused of fraud during ICO
Former Ethereum advisor Steven Nerayoff accused both Vitalik and his father Dmitry Buterin of orchestrating a smear campaign against him. He cited a video in which the Ethereum co-founder can be heard alleging Nerayoff’s involvement in ICO fraud. Nerayoff contends that this move was designed to make him a scapegoat and divert attention away from Vitalik.
Vitalik Buterin continues to deposit Ethereum to exchanges
Vitalik Buterin recently continued to deposit ETH to Coinbase, sparking speculation among investors and putting pressure on the leading altcoin, Ethereum.
On Sept 25, the wallet involved with Vitalik Buterin transferred another 400 ETH (~$632,000) to Coinbase. With this transaction, the total amount of ETH that the founder of Ethereum transferred to Coinbase was 1000 ETH. Vitalik Buterin transferred 600 ETH last month.
UpBit temporarily freezes withdrawals following scam token airdrop
UpBit, South Korea’s largest crypto exchange, has temporarily suspended deposits and withdrawals of Aptos (APT) after detecting what it said was an abnormal amount of deposit attempts related to a scam token.
Upbit discovered an “abnormal deposit attempt” while monitoring flows of APT into and out of its wallet system, according to a statement. UpBit’s issues stemmed from a system error that misread a set of airdropped scam tokens as being the equivalent of legitimate ones, said Twitter user Definalist. The account reported that the scam tokens were linked to a fraudulent website called “ClaimAPT.com,” which airdropped them into almost 400,000 wallets, according to TraceMove. The scam made trading volume on the exchange rise from 260,000 APT on Sept 14 to 14.91 million APT on Sept 23.
Terra Classic community votes to stop USTC minting
The Terra Classic protocol will no longer mint terraUSD (USTC), the infamous token that slumped 99% amid the implosion of the once high-flying Terra protocol in 2022. A community vote on Terra Classic’s governance forum that ended last week won 59% approval to stop all USTC minting.
The community hopes this proposal will help USTC regain its original value of $1 by burning the trillions of tokens that were created during the collapse. There were only 75 billion tokens to be burned until now (1% of the nearly 6 trillion tokens in circulation) according to LUNC Metrics. The current value of USTC is $0.012.
Conspiracy theory: China is pouring billions of dollars into Bitcoin
Arthur Hayes’s analyst focuses on Chinese Yuan (CNY), which has lost nearly 15% of its value against the US Dollar (USD) since the beginning of the year. Then, he raised the question of whether China might consider investing billions of dollars in Bitcoin and other assets as a way to hedge against economic fluctuations.
Hayes said he consulted China researcher Andrew Collier from Orient Capital Research, who proposed examining the gap between China’s net export earnings and its official foreign exchange reserves to gauge potential capital flight.
The data revealed that while China’s foreign exchange reserves have increased by $32.4 billion this year, international net exports have surged by $553.25 billion, leaving approximately $520.85 billion unaccounted for.
Arthur Hayes speculated that a part of this capital could have flowed into some assets. It is possible that China has bought gold and paid down offshore USD debt held by its banks and corporations. He also suggested that some of the capital has poured into cryptocurrencies, especially Bitcoin.
SEC Continues to delay decision on Bitcoin ETF Spot filings
The SEC continues to delay decisions on Bitcoin ETF Spot and Ethereum ETF Spot filings after four US congressmen urge SEC chair Gensler to approve spot Bitcoin ETFs immediately. The SEC has delayed Ark/21Shares’s Bitcoin ETF Spot application to January 2024. The approval of Ark and VanEck’s application to open Ethereum ETF Spot was also delayed.