The cryptocurrency market has been experiencing some turbulence in the past few days and still digesting the impact of Silvergate’s operational issues. Last Friday, the crypto-friendly bank decided to close its Silvergate Exchange Network (SEN), its crypto payment service.

Coincidentally, Bybit announced the suspension of USD payment via bank transfers. The Dubai-based exchange gave a deadline to withdraw USD by Mar. 10, 2023, 12 AM UTC due to “service outages” from the end-point processing partner, making the community question if it used SEN for USD payments. Days after the announcement, Bybit unveiled the launch of a new debit card allowing users to make payments and withdraw cash using cryptocurrency holdings using the Mastercard network.

Analysts seemed to have a positive approach to the Silvergate trouble. Matt Weller, Forex.com’s global head of research, said he won’t be surprised by a drop to $20,000 in Bitcoin price, but the Silvergate story doesn’t look like it’s “leading to broad contagion.”

March Zheng, the co-founder and managing partner of Bizantine Capital, is paying attention to economic data from a re-opened China instead as it “could lead to an increase in appetite for assets like crypto.” However, the economic outlook isn’t really optimistic since the Chinese government announced a modest economic growth target of 5% in 2023 – one of its lowest targets in decades.

Crypto headwinds didn’t move around Silvergate only. Recently, Wall Street Journal published a report alleging the company established a U.S. entity back in 2019, as a means of mitigating the potential legal consequences of operating in the United States. Binance was also among many firms that sought to bring Gary Gensler into the fold as an adviser while he was teaching at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

“But Binance and Binance.US have been much more intertwined than the companies have disclosed, mixing staff and finances and sharing an affiliated entity…,” the report stated. As a result, Binance, as a global company, had access to information about its customers in the United States. Binance and Binance.US admitted the lack of controls in the early days, saying that they “made some initial missteps which have now been rectified.”

The WSJ report came out as the news firm was facing criticism from Tether for “misinformation and inaccuracies” about the stablecoin issuer’s faked documents for bank accounts.

Amid the crypto chaos, Kraken appears to be today’s silver lining as the exchange is planning to launch its own bank despite a challenging regulatory environment, according to Kraken’s chief legal officer Marco Santori.

In response to the market’s post-Silvergate uncertainty, Bitcoin (BTC) started a new week under $22,500, the level it has remained over the weekend. The coin has almost seen no changes in price in the past 24 hours with just a 0.08% drop.

It happened while analytics firm CryptoQuant reported an increase in stablecoin exchange inflows, reaching the “highest level of this year” following a surge on March 5. Data from IntoTheBlock suggests that 63% of Bitcoin holders are making money, but given that the price is trading sideways and stablecoin inflows spiked, it seems that investors are not ready to sell, and they may be looking for better entry to accumulate.

Ethereum (ETH) also saw modest changes in price over the past day, while Cardano (ADA), marking a 2.45% drop, is raising eyebrows as IntoTheBlock data pointed out that 80% of its holders are suffering losses.

Top altcoin gainers and losers

Gainers:

Decentraland MANA (+4.08%)

FTX Token FTT (+3.67%)

GMX GMX (+3.59%)

Losers:

SingularityNET AGIX (-6.63%)

Dash DASH (-5.66%)

Quant QNT (-4.91%)

NFT Market Map

March 5 was a big day for Bitcoin NFT and Yuga Labs as the TwelveFold auction officially went live. Nevertheless, the community’s reaction was not really positive. BAYC creator faced criticism from the crypto community, including the creator of Bitcoin Ordinals, over the way it organized the auction.

Amid controversy, Yuga family collections lost their top positions in trading volume to newer projects including MG Land (+22.61%), Owls (-37.38%), and Wrapped Cryptopunks (+241.86%).