The FTX madness continues! Binance to take over the industry?

By Satoshi Club | Satoshi Club AMA Recaps | 22 Jan 2023

The FTX & Alameda left the market bleeding out of liquidity. Investors are taking their money out while driving the crypto prices down further and further. The global crypto market cap is sitting at ~$835B at the time of the writing. We’re getting closer to the lowest point of 2022 and it’s not looking good at all.

Bitcoin started last week at $16,379. On Nov. 15, BTC jumped up 3.1%, reaching $17,171 as crypto and equities markets responded to PPI data which showed wholesale prices rose 0.2% for the month and 8% from a year ago. $17,171 remains the highest price reached by Bitcoin last week.

On Nov.17 Bitcoin fell to $16,400 amid news that Genesis Global Capital, the crypto lending arm of Genesis Trading, had paused withdrawals over liquidity problems. During the past week, Bitcoin failed to flip $17,000 to support. Will he do it in the next one?

Meanwhile, Binance starts its recovery fund for crypto projects that face liquidity crises. Houbi, Tron and Justin Sun get on the track and announce their participation in CZ’s reconstruction project. Binance urges other crypto or non-crypto companies to participate. While we don’t know the exact sum, the criteria set by CZ are quite clear. Do you know what else is clear as day? FTX won’t be included under any circumstances!

The deeds of FTX continue to hurt the industry. BlockFi, in lack of liquidity and with no industry partners other than the bankrupt FTX, plans to file for bankruptcy protection while Genesis Trading needs a $1B injection to just continue operating as it needs to. It seems like this crypto crisis is hitting harder than ever. The winter has come and many companies won’t get through it. We need you, Jon Snow!

FTX is now the number one source of Bitcoin price volatility. The stakes are decidedly high; the initial shock may be over, but the consequences are only just beginning to surface. Bitcoin continues to trade inside the tight range between $16,100 and $17,190. Generally, periods of tight consolidation are followed by an increase in volatility.

At the time of writing, Bitcoin is trading around $16,100, down 3% in the last 24 hours.

If bulls want to avoid a further decline, they will have to push and sustain the price above the breakdown level of $17,622. Such a move will suggest strong demand at lower levels. The pair could then climb to the psychological level of $20,000.

Solana DeFi sees almost $700M in value wiped out on FTX fallout. Both Binance and OKX made Solana deposits of USDT and USDC impossible this week, trying to rip SOL’s price apart. While they returned USDT and USDC deposits on Solana in a couple of days, the damage has been already done. Tether and their $1B worth of USDT conversion from Solana to Ethereum also chipped in some damage.

Binance’s U.S. arm is relaunching a bid to purchase the bankrupt crypto lending platform Voyager after FTX beat out Binance and Wave Financial with a bid valued at about $1.4B in the summer. CZ is at war and he feels it. In light of this news, VGX’s price jumped to $0.45. Binance is slowly taking all of FTX’s business.

It seems like CZ’s move to announce a massive FTT deployment was well-planned after all. FTX’s part of the crypto market got right over to Binance as their customers ran to the biggest and most secure competitor. It’s scary how the crypto company is slowly but surely taking over the whole industry. Isn’t it the very purpose of decentralization, to have healthy competition and not one company controlling it all?

Despite the market decline, Bitcoin’s network fundamentals tell a curious story — hash rate continues to circle all-time highs and not fall significantly, indicating that at least certain miners are maintaining network hashing power, not shutting down operations en masse. At the latest automated readjustment on Nov. 20, Bitcoin network difficulty increased by 0.51% to hit a new record high.

The NFT market has been also a battleground. Yuga Labs Acquired Beeple’s WENEW, 10KTF NFT Project. The company that owns BAYC is slowly but surely overtaking the whole NFT industry as Binance is doing with the crypto industry. Nevertheless, the floor price of their most praised collection, BAYC, took a hit last week, but it came back to normal.

Meanwhile, following OpenSea’s announcement that it would enforce royalties, NFT marketplace X2Y2 has declared that it would do the same. It was only a few weeks ago when the trend of forgoing NFT royalties seemed to be on the rise, with marketplaces like Sudoswap, Magic Eden, and others opting for optional or no royalties altogether. These moves have seen strong backlash from the community, including from projects like BAYC maker Yuga Labs.

Enough of the past week, let’s talk about what waits for us in the next one.

Of course, there is the World Cup, how can we not talk about this one? The FIFA World Cup 2022, held in Qatar, has crypto.com as its biggest sponsor. Don’t forget that the World Cup is the biggest sports event in the whole world. The impact on crypto will be insane. Hundreds of millions of people will get to see the crypto.com logo there.

Related to football, the Ethernity Chain will present its biggest NFT collection so far. Leo Messi’s triumphs are returning this Nov 27th, with the “Time Machine” NFTs made by Ethernity Chain. Leo is getting closer to his biggest competitor, Cristiano, who also has an NFT collection ready to be deployed.

Meanwhile, the US economy waits for one of its biggest events. The FOMC Meeting Minutes will be released this week and, following the tradition, the market will either go up or down. We’ll see where will the crypto market go.

Talking about Bitcoin, the sentiment suggests that everyone is expecting the worst. A case in point comes in the form of Genesis Trading, part of the Digital Currency Group (DCG) conglomerate, which last week halted payouts at its crypto lending arm.

Further contention is focused on GBTC’s discount to the Bitcoin spot price, which is now almost at 50% for the first time ever.

A look at volatility on the daily chart showed Bollinger Bands expanding with price testing the lower band at the time of writing on Nov. 21 — a suggestion that lower levels amid increased volatility are to come.

Bitcoin’s MVRV-Z score indicator is now approaching levels synonymous with every macro bottom. Whenever the Z-Score fell out of the green channel, the bottom was in for $BTC.