As many media already said, CZ and Binance is getting sued. In this post I try sum the most important info!

HERE IS THE OFFICIAL ANNOUNCEMENT OF THE SEC: https://www.sec.gov/news/press-release/2023-101

IF YOU CLICK ON THE ANNOUNCEMENT THE OFFICIAL PDF DOCUMENT OF THE COMPLAINT IS AT THE RIGHT OR BELOW. (DESKTOP/MOBILE)

Most important info:

"The Complaint also charges violations of critical registration-related provisions of the federal securities laws:

• Binance and BAM Trading with operating unregistered national securities exchanges, broker-dealers, and clearing agencies;
• Binance and BAM Trading with the unregistered offer and sale of Binance’s own crypto assets, including a so-called exchange token, BNB, a so-called stablecoin, Binance USD (BUSD), certain crypto-lending products, and a staking-as-a-service program; and
• Zhao as a control person for Binance’s and BAM Trading’s operation of unregistered national securities exchanges, broker-dealers, and clearing agencies."

ALLEGATIONS IN GENERAL:

• UNREGISTERED EXCHANGE, BROKER, AND CLEARING AGENCY
• UNREGISTERED OFFER AND SALE OF CRYPTO ASSETS
• FAILURE TO RESTRICT U.S. INVESTORS FROM ACCESSING BINANCE.COM
• MISLEADING INVESTORS
• BNB AND BUSD ARE SECURITIES ALONG THESE TOKENS/COINS: SOL, ADA, MATIC, FIL, ATOM, SAND, MANA, ALGO, AXS, and COTI
• ESCAPE THE REGISTRATION REQUIREMENTS OF THE FEDERAL SECURITY LAWS
• EVADING US REGULATORY

CZ's reactions:

https://preview.redd.it/lcm2zh0r284b1.png?width=598&format=png&auto=webp&v=enabled&s=8cbb81520a1c0b4418d47a8a7d41435e33918f6f

https://twitter.com/cz_binance/status/1665742100845961217

What do you guys think?

It looks like the SEC is up to their old tricks again, doing what they do best which is omnibus a bunch of securities infractions into a legal complaint and try to use that as precedent for regulation.

In the lawsuit they claim that all of these tokens are securities:

-Solana

-Polygon

-Cardano

-Filecoin

-Cosmos

-Decentraland

-Algorand

-Sandbox

-COTI

-AXIS

Looks like theyre really committed to the rapid fire approach. This shouldnt hold up because they would actually have to argue individually that each project is a security but it shows how little they care to do so. Feels like more of a warning shot saying “yeah we really dont like these ones”. Im sure theres more that they have this opinion on but “Schroedinger’s securities” i guess we will have to wait and see

​

https://preview.redd.it/0plrhcbuj74b1.png?width=624&format=png&auto=webp&v=enabled&s=ca2d4f450cc164b42c65d3bf4f135f94ed7ed784

This chart shows Bitcoin trading volume for the past 3 years and the current lows of trading volume are clearly visible. Volume is even lower than during pre-FTX 2022 when exchanges and platforms were freeing withdrawals and falling left and right. It is fairly obvious why this is bad for exchanges as less trading means less fees, that account for the majority of exchange revenue. This tends to put a lot of stress on exchanges and you see it in the promotions offered by them. For instance, FTX ran more than double the amount of trading competition promotions they did in the prior year than they did in the 10 months running up to their collapse in an effort to encouraging trading. Let’s go through the activities stressed exchanges are doing to encourage trading. As some examples:

• MEXC recently has dropped both their spot maker and taker fees to 0%. Futures maker fees are also 0% and futures taker fees are dropped to 0.01%. Now, they only make money off futures takers trades and withdrawal fees. This is in addition to the MANY promotion/trading competition emails they send)

​

MEXC

• Gate.io dropped spot trading maker fees and fiat currency trading fees to 0 with 0% maker and taker fees on BTC-margined futures.

​

Gate.io

• Binance have ramped up activity on their launchpad pushing a lot more new projects. They also have quite infamously listed useless tokens of PEPE and FLOKI. It was quite atypical for them to list such a ew (and useless) token in PEPE and you should also question why they only now decided to list FLOKI as well. Bianance is also still running their BTC zero-fee promotion of the TUSD quoted pair.

​

Remember, things must be pretty extreme for exchange to choose to take ZERO fees for the majority of their products. If people are buying, there'd be no need to drop fees to encourage more trading.

A number of exchanges/platforms have also lost access to US markets as platforms like Binance and Nexo have left Canada, due to new regulations. Bittrex, Nexo and MEXC had already closed doors to US customers, while others in the US face uncertainty. Coinbase is the most prominent, has been forced to stop its lending product as well as many Cefi staking service providers have been forced to stop its lending product and Binance’s BUSD is a dying coin as their issuer Paxos was ordered to stop minting. All of this obvious take it hit to revenue.

Now the dominoes have already begun to fall. Hotbit, an exchange that serviced over 1 million people, has shut down very recently and BKEX, one servicing over 8 million, has frozen all customer withdrawals for some shady reasons that they claim to be aiding in police investigations. Patricia, another platform that service close to 1 million has also frozen withdrawals. It’s a little weird because there were also allegations of money laundering around two of them, and allegations of a hack involved in another but the reality is that exchanges are always dealing with money laundering accusations(because of the anonymity of crypto) and investigations and there are always hacks occurring under the radar. But make no mistake that anytime trade volume is low, fees are low, so revenue is low and that’s prime time for a crash. Just remember that it’s not your keys.

Gary Gensler has declared the following Crypto Currencies Securities

-Solana

-Polygon

-Cardano

-Filecoin

-Cosmos

-Decentraland

-Algorand

-Sandbox

-COTI

-AXIS

The sub will not stand for this attack and with the backing of dozens of other subreddits have organized a site blackout to teach Gary Gensler a lesson.

Gary Gensler is very active in a few subs that I can't named here to keep the post safe for work but for 48 hours those subs will be gone and he won't be able to get his jollies off. Perhaps this will teach him to stop coming after ATOM which is not a security.

The movement has already gained main stream medias attention.

​

https://preview.redd.it/pk2czcl3094b1.jpg?width=985&format=pjpg&auto=webp&v=enabled&s=a0ce6adfc2e6bad54e71899dec22105025c88902

The sub currently has the details in a pinned post on the front page of the sub

​

https://preview.redd.it/wdjlffs6094b1.jpg?width=624&format=pjpg&auto=webp&v=enabled&s=96957ebc6dfc210d74045d49567cf98880e77668

Make sure to join in this protest against Gary by avoiding Reddit on June 12th - 14th.

check on all the other subs you frequent because they are probably participating in the same blackout which has been dubbed the Reddit API blackout.

Atom is Positively not Involved in being a security

TLDR: ATOM is not a security

Over at the "Ledger Sub," a survey was conducted with almost 3000 people voting.

https://preview.redd.it/xzwkqvb3d74b1.png?width=1294&format=png&auto=webp&v=enabled&s=3907ba5cc7bf8cd09dcef95578890c0cc4b4031e

• 41% said I'll continue using Ledger
• 19% said I moved (or will be moving) to another hardware wallet.
• 12% said I'll be using a mix of hardware wallets, including Ledger.
• 3% said I'll be using a mix of hardware wallets, excluding Ledger.
• 24% said I haven't made a decision yet.

Two weeks after the Ledger "incident," that means that 24% of people have not made up their mind. Honestly, if you have not decided to move away from Ledger in the first two weeks, you will likely not move away from it. The more time elapses, the easier it is to fall back into your normal routine.

One thing that has changed is that I have not seen a single recommendation for Ledger from this sub in the past two weeks.

Still, likely 50%+ of people are not going to make a change with their Ledger.

While we all may feel a bit down nowadays as Bitcoin and Crypto have just been going sideways for the past days or even down. Right now BTC sits at -20% losses trough the last three months, which clearly show our slow crawl downwards, those are by far the worst and most boring times to be here. But as many wise people have always been saying, during such challenging times we should just “zoom out“.

By doing so you will actually realise the power and what a force Bitcoin has been over the past years, or may I even say the past decade… With Cryptos short history a decade is basically all of it, so looking at the performance in the last decade we are looking at the performance of the first ever decade for Crypto and it has been a force indeed.

​

All Assets performance from 2011 to 2023, by CharlieBilello

Here we can see an official report of the bets performing assets over the whole last decade, from 2011 to 2023. Firstly we can say that out of the last twelve years BTC has been the best performing asset for 9 years and all of those has been coming consecutively in a three bundle, followed by one bear year. This results in jaw-breaking performance of 8.996.675%, over 8 millions percentage gains, unbelievable. The closest to Crypto comes NASDAQ with a way lower 160% gains over those years.

Now of course many would like to denigrate the force Bitcoin has been over the years, but the stats can not lie. Bitcoin has made Crypto dominate the last decade in the financial sector like probably no other asset did on that magnitude in it‘s early years. Now lets hope BTC just has a a bit of that vim left and the next decade will still be amazing even with lower gains.

I would like to be the first "Analyst" that claims the current period as the "Apathy Period". No animals around. No bears, no bulls. Just pure apathy.

1. As recent statistics show, Bitcoin google searches are at 2020 levels of low:

​

https://preview.redd.it/vup63qjea74b1.png?width=2401&format=png&auto=webp&v=enabled&s=5f9fb29a403888c3ece3dcbf465c4a27b7966caf

Although consistently higher than previous "apathy periods", bitcoin search volume is declining, mainly due to the fact that SBF is slowly becoming irrelevant (and hopefully sentenced soon) and we haven't seen any major ponzi schemes, algorithmic stablecoins and custodian wallets shitting the bed.

1. BTC trading volume is also at its lowest, but I want to be optimistic and say that crypto bros like myself have finally learned the importance of self-custody and that bitcoin is actually meant to be kept in your own cold wallet. (insert joke about btc existing only in the blockchain)

​

Source: bitcoinity.org

​

Source: messari.io

Now, why am I blabbering? I work as a traditional macro analyst. I get paid to analyze the past and predict the future. And my company tasked me to create a bear case for the current equity market. Now I am not going to post the full report here (you can DM me if you wish) but there's a lot of sketchy and actually scary stuff going on behind the scenes in most major economies (and wait 'till you see what's going on in developed economies). Anyway, without pretending to be Michael Burry, here's a thought:

Attention has recently shifted towards the Nasdaq and tech companies. With every company going over their earnings report within 3 seconds before quickly turning into their carefully-crafted AI speech, investors are losing their shit and start throwing money at every company with the only metric being: AI mentions-per sentence ratio. While BTC is trading sideways with decreasing volume. the Nasdaq is up approx. 20% in the past 3 months. Interest rates above 5%? Don't care. What banking crisis? Are we still talking about inflation?

It is likely that the Nasdaq is experiencing a "euphoria phase" with companies being priced at 200x earnings (not naming names) thinking that an AI tool that creates custom dialogues in video games will change the world we live in.

In the meantime, big bucks have forgotten about crypto. And that's good news! Traction from mainstream media is slowing down. Sophisticated scammers are now looking elsewhere. Failed projects are decreasing. In the meantime, true believers are accumulating in the background. Developers are trying to find solutions to problems. Bitcoin is still running.

Think about all the stories from people who actually made money through crypto (and other speculative assets). How did they do it? Well, they accumulated when everyone stopped paying attention, and sold when everyone started doing so.

Edit: Welp folks, I guess I kinda jinxed it. Gary Gensler woke up and chose violence.

Jeffrey Wilcke (Ethereum co-founder) just transferred 22K ETH ($41M) to Kraken 1 hour ago.

His last selling action was on 5 & 6 Jan 2021, he transferred 15K ETH to Kraken.

His address still holds 150K ETH (~$280M)

Interestingly, if you take a look at the transaction history from his wallet on this picture, you will see that he always sold at the bottom line but no action when it is at the top. We could use this as a signal that maybe we will see the bottom of this dump season soon 🙂

Source: Spot On Chain

Spot On Chain website

Most of us know by now, Atomic Wallet has suffered an exploit, leading to a significant loss of funds. Information is still being communicated, but here are some updated stats and statistics (and some warnings), regarding the hack.

• 35 Million Stolen - Confirmed so far by on chain analysis
• Less than 1% of accounts hacked, according to Atomic Wallet (still a lot imo)
• Not a lot of news from Atomic Wallet, other than "an investigation is ongoing"
• Refund scams have been reported. No-one is refunding stolen funds right now. Anyone claiming to do so is a scammer
• Atomic Wallet has acknowledged the attack
• Many scam accounts are reaching out as "Atomic Wallet Support". Do not fall for this. Stay safe.
• Single largest wallet hacked was around 7.95 Million Dollars

​

This was meant as a quick update on the information we have. Not much has been added, but it is important to stay informed.

​

As always, good luck and stay safe out there. My thoughts to anyone who lost funds during this attack

There’s quite a bit of jokes surrounding crypto since ftx. Some conspiracy others mostly just trying to make light of what has been a relatively rubbish couple years for hodlers and traders, but there is always the motif of “crypto if inevitable”

But Is it? Is it in this current iteration?

This isn’t a fud but rather realistic reflection on how we even got here. Even if you remove the cexes as many of them have been a net negative over the last little while

Where has the community found it’s niche to be so confident about crypto?

More simply how do you know crypto is inevitable despite the obvious of it being a great invention/finding. Especially when you consider your opponent is governments with nukes and control that reaches just every avenue of the internet no matter how stupid they are in reality?