Bitcoin fell to an all-year low of US$17,603 in Asia on Tuesday morning as investors were shocked by Binance’s takeover of the FTX exchange amid speculation of capital and liquidity problems at FTX, one of the world’s most prominent cryptocurrency exchanges.
Ether (ETH) was part of a more significant sell-off of the top ten cryptocurrencies by market capitalization, as it also fell at a rate of 10.55% in the last 24 hours to $1302.55 on Wednesday morning.
Bitcoin dropped 10.2% in 24 hours to US$18,527. Following the announcement of the Binance takeover, the benchmark cryptocurrency rose 6% but fell back due to concerns about FTX’s balance sheet and contagion fears. According to CoinMarketCap, ETH fell 15.2% to $1,330.
BNB, the native token of Binance’s blockchain, was also hit by the effect of the FTX takeover, but its losses were minor in comparison to the rest of the top ten cryptos, falling 3.3% to US$326.68.
Solana was one of the coins hit hard by the announcement, falling 19% to US$23.98, its lowest level for the year, while Dogecoin fared even worse, falling 21.7% to US$0.08.
The purchase of FTX by Binance was announced overnight on Tuesday by Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao and FTX founder and CEO Sam Bankman-Fried. This is due to FTX’s liquidity crisis, with debt accounting for 54% of assets as of June 30.
It also owns a majority stake in its native token, FTT, which suggests it is insolvent, as the token lost over 75% of its value before recovering slightly to $5.43.
According to Semafor, FTX was reportedly seeking financing of up to US$6 billion to resolve the deficit on its balance sheet. The problems at FTX are raising fears of a wider liquidity crisis, similar to the multibillion-dollar crash of the Terra/LUNA stablecoin project in May this year, which bankrupted a slew of crypto firms exposed to Terra.
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