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Mooners & Shakers: Binance-fuelled concerns over FTX cool Bitcoin, crypto market surge

Binance is to sell $US584 million of FTX’s token as it liquidates its FTT stocks. And that has sent a chill through the crypto market.

Rob Badman
4 min read
November 7, 2022 - 2:01PM
Stockhead
Some drama around FTX and its FTT token put a slight chill on the crypto market. Picture: Getty Images
Some drama around FTX and its FTT token put a slight chill on the crypto market. Picture: Getty Images

Well, it was a nice weekend for holders of Bitcoin and many other crypto assets. But it’s Monday, and fresh FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) has surfaced.

This time about FTX and its FTT token.

How serious is that? It’s not completely clear yet – it’s an unfolding story that we’ll touch on in a sec, but fingers crossed it’s not another Terra LUNA or Celsius-like crypto-crashing event. (Unlikely, but stay alert.)

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The total crypto market cap surged by more than 7 per cent over the weekend, but has since cooled off a bit. At the time of writing, it’s still holding onto some gains there, however, with Bitcoin hovering back above $US21k for the first time in almost two months.

Binance vs FTX

But what’s all this FTX noise, then? A lot of it is actually coming from the Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao, aka “CZ”. We’ll try to nutshell what we know so far.

• Binance, via CZ on Twitter, has announced it’s selling more than $US584 million in holdings of the FTX exchange/utility token FTT.

• CZ revealed that he will liquidate FTT gradually to reduce any market impact. He stressed that this is not an attempt to hurt FTX.

• FTX is owned by another crypto billionaire – Sam Bankman-Fried, who also owns trading firm Alameda Research. The Binance announcement comes a few days after rumours regarding Alameda Research’s financial health.

The trading firm (assets totalling $US14.6 billion) is closely tied to FTX and has huge exposure ($US3.6 billion) to the FTT token, according to crypto-media outlet CoinDesk.

It’s sparked doubt from crypto-industry commentators about the financial stability of Alameda Research and FTX more broadly.

• CZ has also said this, claiming FTX has been secretly lobbying against other industry players:

• There’s more to the story, which the FT covers here. Meanwhile, would an exchange-giant spat between Binance and FTX hurt the crypto market? It certainly isn’t the most helpful narrative right now, so here’s hoping it blows over quickly.

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Top 10 overview

With the overall crypto market cap at $US1.09 trillion, down about 1.7 per cent since this time Sunday, here’s the current state of play among top 10 tokens – according to CoinGecko.

Source: CoinGecko
Source: CoinGecko

Over the weekend, Bitcoin (BTC) peaked up just above $US21,400, while Ethereum (ETH) also rallied, trading above $US1,600 for most of the past couple of days.

Tell me why, I don’t like Mondays?

Partly because it so often shows up exuberant weekend crypto trading to be completely unreliable for the week ahead.

As mentioned, though, at present, some gains have been retained, so we’ll see.

What’s coming up this week that could affect the narrative? US Consumer Price Index inflation data for the month of October. Set to land on November 10.

Thanks, Michaël. Perhaps the crypto market can join you in the mountains.

Other things to note in the top 10 by market cap … yep, the Binance token BNB is up 14 per cent over the past week, Dogegoin (DOGE) continues to slide after its Twitter/Musk-fuelled recent run, and Solana’s SOL token is the big daily loser (-10.8 per cent).

What’s up with SOL? Clearly not much in price action, which is perhaps strange, as it had a pretty positive announcement (a Google-related partnership) over the weekend at its large, well-attended Breakpoint event in Lisbon, Portugal.

Google Cloud has announced a plan to become a validator on the Solana network, similar to its recent Ethereum node announcement. Validator nodes effectively verify, vote on and maintain a record of transactions on a blockchain network.

And Google’s kind of a big deal, we hear.

Uppers and downers: 11–100

Sweeping a market-cap range of about $US10.1 billion to about $US427 million in the rest of the top 100, let’s find some of the biggest 24-hour gainers and losers at press time. (Stats accurate at time of publishing, based on CoinGecko.com data.)

DAILY PUMPERS

• BTSE Token (BTSE), (market cap: $US637 million) +2 per cent

• Chiliz (CHZ), (mc: $US1.46 billion) +2 per cent

• WhiteBit Token (WBT), (mc: $US977 million) +1 per cent

• Chain (XCN), (mc: $US1.1 billion) +1 per cent

DAILY SLUMPERS

• Tokenize XChange (TKX), (market cap: $US1.22 billion) -11 per cent

• Aave (AAVE), (mc: $US1.23 billion) -10 per cent

• The Graph (GRT), (mc: $US670 million) -9 per cent

• Evmos (EVMOS), (mc: $US610 million) -8 per cent

• Fantom (FTM), (mc: $US678 million) -7 per cent

Lower-cap wrap

There’s a lot of chaff the further you delve down the market cap list. Occasional grains of wheat, too, though. Remember to DYOR.

DAILY PUMPERS

• Goldfinch (GFI), (market cap: $US29 million) +54 per cent

• Phala Network (PHA), (mc: $US113 million) + 53 per cent

• Rarible (RARI), (mc: $US44 million) +14 per cent

• Ocean Protocol (OCEAN), (mc: $US98 million) +32 per cent

• Mask Network (MASK), (mc: $US244 million) +23 per cent

DAILY SLUMPERS

• OriginTrail (TRAC), (market cap: $US88 million) -14 per cent

• Ethereum Name Service (ENS), (mc: $US423 million) -9 per cent

• ImmutableX (IMX), (mc: $US343 million) -9 per cent

• LooksRare (LOOKS), (mc: $US118 million) -9 per cent

Around the blocks

A selection of randomness and pertinence that stuck with us on our morning moves through the Crypto Twitterverse …

This content first appeared on stockhead.com.au

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Originally published as Mooners & Shakers: Binance-fuelled concerns over FTX cool Bitcoin, crypto market surge

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