First Mover Asia: Binance’s Exchange Flow Flips Positive; Bitcoin Trades Flat

Good morning. Here’s what’s happening:

Prices: It’s a slow day for bitcoin and ether, but exchange tokens are the next ones to watch.

Insights: Altcoins flagged in the SEC lawsuit last week have been doing better more recently. What’s behind their stabilizing?

Bitcoin, Ether Trade Sideways

As QCP Capital wrote in a recent note, this week will be “action-packed” with the U.S. CPI and June FOMC coming down the pipe.

“This promises volatility on the horizon, and we might finally get the break in BTC/ETH that we’ve started positioning for this month,” QCP wrote.

It just, however, needs to kick off – and that hasn’t happened quite yet.

Meanwhile, the market might be thinking that the Securities and Exchange’s (SEC) case against Binance might be more bark than bite.

Data from Nansen.ai shows that flow across all the chains it tracks went back into the green for Binance. Nansen shows that during the last 24 hours, Binance had a netflow of $470 million. This is certainly a pittance to the nearly $4 billion in value that has departed the exchange during the last week, but it is still a material amount that should be noted.

Binance’s BNB token is still well within the red, but its price has begun to stabilize. CoinGecko data shows that other exchange tokens like OKB and Crypto.com’s CRO are deeper in the red than BNB, while decentralized exchange tokens like Uniswap are up.

Altcoins Stabilize. What’s Next?

The co-founder of crypto security firm De.Fi called the relative calm in altcoins flagged by U.S. Securities and Exchange lawsuits against Binance and Coinbase last week “mean regression.

“People say, ‘here’s a buying opportunity, and let’s come in and pick it up,” Michael Rosmer told CoinDesk TV’s “First Mover” Program on Monday in a conversation that initially focused on his company’s report that crypto investors had lost $54 million in rug pulls.

All but a couple of the 19 tokens mentioned in the suit, which accuses the exchange giants of violating securities laws, have sunk by double-digits over the past seven days with CHZ and SAND, the tokens of the Chiliz network and The Sandbox metaverse game, falling more than 28% and 27%, respectively and ADA, the native crypto of the Cardana blockchain, dropping over 21% as investors looked fretfully at an an increasingly uncertain U.S. regulatory environment in which cryptos have yet to receive a designation as security, commodity or otherwise.

Still, those tokens were recently in the green over the past 24 hours. “Any time you get a very rapid sell-off, people are going to buy it and push it up on the other side,” Rosmer said.

But he also struck an upbeat note, saying that people have probably realized that U.S. agencies do not want to drive projects out of the country. “It’s noteworthy that they went after Coinbase and Binance,” he said. They haven’t gone and sued any of these projects directly. That’s kind of telling.”

He added: “Part of the reason is the government in the U.S. operates largely based on lobbying influences from the financial industry, and the financial industry would like to eventually be the player who plays as Coinbase or Binance themselves, as they want to kock those guys out but then still be able to have U.S.-based projects that get traded.”

Prices stabilized Monday for Solana’s SOL, Cardano’s ADA and Polygon’s MATIC after being impacted by a sudden sell-off over the weekend. Separately, May 2023 witnessed a wave of scams and hacking incidents that resulted in cumulative losses of over $54 million, a new report from security firm De.Fi showed. De.Fi co-founder Michael Rosmer joined to break down the report. Plus, a look at the relationship between artificial intelligence, crypto, and blockchain. EY Global Blockchain Leader Paul Brody and Foresight Institute CEO Allison Duettmann joined the conversation.