Crypto prices have been surprisingly resilient this year given the numerous government crackdowns. Last week, Binance’s chief strategy officer, general counsel and SVP of compliance resigned. According to Fortune, their decisions to leave had to do with CZ’s response to an ongoing DOJ investigation. WOW!! I suppose there won’t be a settlement between Binance and the DOJ and Binance is in deep deep trouble. BTC and BNB prices barely moved after the news broke though. I could understand the BTC price being resilient but the BNB price being strong is a bit curious. (BNB is Binance’s corporate token.) It’s either that very few retail investors own BNB or Binance actively maintains the BNB’s price levels or both. It does feel the crypto prices are heavily manipulated by Binance, which accounts for 50+% of crypto’s trading volume around the world.
Despite the price resilience, I believe crypto is in a very fragile state. Binance could become defunct as its regulatory troubles deepen. USDT and TUSD printers ought to stop at some point and show us the actual dollars. I personally am very skeptical of the so-called BTC/ETH/BNB prices quoted by Binance and its affiliate coinmarketcap. Binance has a very strong incentive to manipulate the crypto prices at high levels to keep the crypto grift going but they could only keep this going for so long without retail investors’ participation. AFAIK, retail investors are mostly gone after FTX. These days crypto is mostly a silly game with fake money, fake promises, fake prices and fake exchanges that’s not even fun. I don’t know when crypto will officially collapse but I think the wise thing to do is to stay very very far away from it.