• This article recaps the events of the past week in the cryptocurrency community, starting with the U.S. SEC’s decision to launch legal action against Binance and Coinbase for unregistered securities.
• Many digital assets had a significant price drop over the weekend, while BTC and ETH managed to stay relatively stable.
• On Thursday evening, however, BTC dropped from over $26K to around $24K – its lowest position since March 2021.
SEC Crackdown on Crypto Exchanges
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) began a legal battle against Binance last Monday and followed it up by filing a lawsuit against Coinbase next day for offering unregistered securities to retail investors. As expected, this news led to heavy price drops among crypto assets but some were able to recover most losses by the end of last week.
Weekend Bloodbath
On Saturday morning numerous digital assets plummeted by double digits as altcoins that were mentioned in the SEC’s filings suffered massive losses due to their status as unregistered securities. Bitcoin and Ethereum largely avoided major declines during this time period due to not being named in those filings.
Fed’s Interest Rate Hikes Pause
The US Consumer Price Index numbers released on Wednesday and The Federal Reserve’s decision on Thursday to pause interest rate hikes did little at first to shake Bitcoin’s stability until Thursday night when it suddenly dropped from over $26K to around $24K – its lowest position since March 2021.
BlackRock Files for Bitcoin Spot ETF
To add fuel onto fire BlackRock recently filed an S-1 form with the US SEC indicating that it intends to list a bitcoin spot exchange-traded fund (ETF). This event was further exacerbated by comments made by US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen who called cryptocurrencies “extremely inefficient” during an interview with CNBC earlier this week leading many investors away from cryptocurrency markets – resulting in even more losses for BTC and other digital assets alike in recent days.
Conclusion
To sum up, it has been an eventful past week for cryptocurrencies due largely in part due to actions taken by regulatory bodies like U.S SEC as well as comments made related officials such as Janet Yellen which have lead many investors away from crypto markets – causing prices of almost all digital assets including BTC & ETH declined significantly during this time frame