The crypto market was hit by negative news again today when Forbes published an article alleging that Binance had moved $1.8 billion of collateral meant to back its customers’ stablecoins to hedge funds last year. However, Binance quickly responded, assuring its users that they were not affected by the alleged move.

Shortly after that, Coinbase announced that it would be suspending trading in Binance USD (BUSD) starting from March 13, as the stablecoin “did not meet” its listing standards. Nevertheless, such headlines didn’t cause a significant price impact on Binance Coin (BNB). The no.4 cryptocurrency by market cap just plunged by 2% following the news regarding Forbes and Coinbase, and has been trading sideways since then with a minor 0.45% daily drop.

In the meantime, Binance appeared to have the intention to replace Binance USD (BUSD) with TrueUSD (TUSD), as the exchange minted $130 million worth of TUSD in a week, making it the 5th-biggest stablecoin so far. Users have reason to expect more support for TUSD trading pairs on Binance in the near future, like what it did to boost the BUSD expansion.

Regulatory scrutiny in the crypto industry is also continuing, with Robinhood Markets Inc. receiving an investigative subpoena from the SEC in December related to its trading and handling of cryptocurrencies. However, the company is cooperating with regulators.

In addition to these issues, crypto liquidity is said to be far from the levels seen before the infamous FTX collapse. Kaiko, a crypto data tool, reported that Bitcoin’s 2% market depth for USDT pairs aggregated from 15 centralized exchanges had slipped to 6,800 BTC, the lowest since May 2022.

Similarly, Ethereum’s 2% market depth has more than halved to 57,000 ETH, compared to 139,000 ETH in October. This makes it more difficult for large institutions to step in, as smaller orders can create deeper impacts on price action.

Glassnode data, which showed indecisiveness among crypto investors, backed the argument as there has not been a big gap between the inflow and outflow volumes from exchanges. The silver lining is long-term holders are keen on keeping their BTC, since exchanges now own 16% less BTC than the oldest holders.

Bitcoin, Ethereum and the broader crypto market suffered losses after the Forbes article. Bitcoin (BTC) lost \(600 of its value, dropping by 2.5% within 3 hours since the publication. The biggest cryptocurrency by market cap has slightly recovered to \)23,400 so far.

Ethereum (ETH) marked a 0.27% decline over the past 24 hours, even though its Sepolia testnet successfully forked in the Shanghai upgrade rehearsal.

Solana (SOL) faced criticism as the team has not found the root cause of the network-wide outage over the weekend. In response to the community’s backlash, SOL recorded a daily loss of 2.67%.

Top altcoin gainers and losers

Gainers:

SingularityNET AGIX (+13.14%)

Immutable X IMX (+11.36%)

Frax Share FXS (+9.91%)

Losers:

Stacks STX (-7.29%)

Conflux CFX (-6.43%)

WEMIX WEMIX (-5.32%)

NFT Market Map

MG Land (+64.88%) surpassed other NFT collections to become the no.1 trending project over the past 24 hours on Opensea as the team is going to unveil more details about the upcoming Alpha Season 3, seeing the floor price go up by 106% to 0,069 ETH.

As Yuga Labs joined the race, projects that leverage the potential of Bitcoin NFTs gained more traction. Emblem Vault V2 (+1,222.51%) is a typical example with an 863% surge in sales recorded on Opensea, helping it rank as the no.7 collection by volume traded on Coin360 Heatmap.