$300 Million in Liquidations in Wake of Latest SEC Enforcement Action

If American regulators were aiming to crash crypto markets and generate losses by instilling fear in investors, they are achieving their goal.

Cryptocurrency markets have shed $55 billion or around 5% since the Securities and Exchange Commission sued Binance for violating securities laws.

As a result, total capitalization has dropped to $1.13 trillion, its lowest level since mid-March.

Crypto Liquidations Surge

According to CoinGlass, there have been over $270 million in long positions liquidated over the past 12 hours or so. Additionally, $24.8 million short positions were liquidated in the crypto market rout.

In the past 24 hours, a total of 116,630 traders were wrecked, with the total liquidations coming in at almost $300 million. Binance has only seen $2.89 million in liquidations, but it tops the list for centralized exchange derivatives liquidations.

Former BitMEX CEO Arthur Hayes wasn’t unfazed, claiming that risk markets were on edge because of the TGA (U.S. Treasury General Account) refill, not the Binance FUD.

The market is down on some binance FUD. But regardless of the catalyst, risk mrkts r on edge cause of the TGA refill. By end of summer the mrkt will move past that and onto the lg amt of money printing humming along in the background. I have a few shitcoins to buy in the meantime pic.twitter.com/w52QABpgvJ

— Arthur Hayes (@CryptoHayes) June 6, 2023

According to Glassnode, Binance has yet to see major outflows, with around 10,000 BTC leaving the exchange. This equates to around a 1.5% decline in Binance’s balance, according to the analytics provider.

Altcoins Taking The Brunt

Bitcoin has retreated 4.8% over the past 12 hours or so to trade at $25,754 at the time of writing. A decline of this magnitude is pretty typical for BTC, but it may seem more severe since markets have been extremely quiet lately. Furthermore, BTC is still within its range-bound channel but is teetering on the lower bounds of it now.

Ethereum has only lost 3.8% and remains above $1,800, which is well within its sideways channel. The same cannot be said for altcoins, however.

As expected, Binance Coin BNB has come off the worse, dumping 9% in a fall to $276, its lowest price since March 12.

The SEC also labeled a large swathe of crypto assets as securities, and they have also been hit hard today. In addition to BNB, these include Cardano (ADA), down 7%, Solana (SOL), down 8%, and Polygon (MATIC), down 6.6%.

Other tarred with the same securities brush include Algorand (ALGO), Cosmos (ATOM), Filecoin (FIL), Sandbox (SAND), Decentraland (MANA), and Axie Infinity (AXS).