Bitcoin lost 10% and dropped its market capitalization to below $100 billion. It is the first time that Bitcoin’s market cap dropped below $100 billion since October 2017. In addition to this, it is also the lowest level for Bitcoin this year.
Many are looking at the Bitcoin Cash hard fork as the reason for this. Ethereum and Ripple also lost significantly. The ERC20 tokens that are on the top of the Ethereum blockchain are also suffering. Among those tokens include Waltonchain, ICON, Ontology, Golem, VeChain, WanChain and among many other tokens. Just how bad is it? In fact, even Basic Attention Token (BAT) along with 0x (ZRX) that have spiked upward prior to getting listed at Coinbase has dropped by 36%.
SEC Going After Projects?
BAT and ZRX listed by Coinbase only mean that both are not considered as securities under the regulations of the US Securities and Exchange Commission. Coinbase has been careful not to include cryptocurrencies that are considered as securities simply because they become a target of the agency for distributing unregistered securities. The US Securities and Exchange Commission has been doing its best in order to provide regulatory clarity for the crypto market. In fact, it has rejected a number of Bitcoin ETF applications for the reason that there is the possibility of price manipulation.
And also, a few months ago, the agency considered Bitcoin and Ethereum as commodities. There are speculations why XRP wasn’t included is due to the lawsuits that Ripple is facing with claims that XRP is a security.
If you are going to ask Jake Chervinsky, who is a securities litigation attorney at Kobre & Kim, he believes that it is possible that the SEC is looking to take down different crypto exchanges and initial coin offering (ICO) projects. He said that “most enforcement actions are kept confidential until they’re resolved to protect both the defendant (from bad press) & the government (from losses & inconsistencies). That’s why this case was settled before it was announced.
On that point, remember all those subpoenas the SEC sent out earlier this year? Just because you haven’t heard about them recently doesn’t mean there aren’t dozens of investigations going on behind the scenes. Sooner or later, the floodgates will open”.
Several Pending Cases
There are several pending cases against ICOs and even crypto exchanges filed by the SEC. EtherData co-founder Zachary Coburn, as well as the exchange, were both charged with the distribution of unregistered securities. This means that there were tokens that were considered by the SEC as securities.
Regulatory clarity is said to bring in the institutional investors. It seems that the agency is doing what it has to do in order to clean the crypto market. A drop in confidence form investors could easily bleed out for the market. Could this mean that the recent drop in Bitcoin’s price is more than just about FUD regarding the Bitcoin Cash hard fork? Could it be that there are other factors at play why the crypto market dropped all of a sudden in the last 24 hours?
