Binance Lawsuit Triggers $700M in Withdrawals; Metaverse Tokens Named by SEC Lead Decline

Crypto markets showed no sign of letting up on Tuesday after the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) sued crypto exchange Binance and its founder Changpeng "CZ" Zhao on allegations of violating federal securities laws.

Data from Nansen.ai shows that outflows from Binance across all protocols hit $719 million over a 24-hour period.

During the U.S. trading hours, net outflows hit $230 million after the SEC announced its lawsuit against Binance.

Despite the seemingly staggering net outflow, that shows no signs of slowing down, Nansen data also shows that Binance’s stablecoin balance remains healthy. The exchange currently has a stablecoin balance of just over $8 billion, with a seven-day outflow of $519 million, or roughly 6% of holdings. OKX, the exchange with the next largest holdings, has a balance of $4 billion.

In a Twitter thread, Seoul-based crypto analytics firm CryptoQuant pointed out that the withdrawals are well within historical norms.

In the complaint, the SEC also alleged that a number of other tokens, including Binance’s BNB token, Solana (SOL), Cardano (ADA), Polygon (MATIC), Coti (COTI) and Algorand blockchains (ALGO), Filecoin network (FIL), Cosmos hub (ATOM), Sandbox platform (SAND), Axie infinity (AXS) and Decentraland (MANA) are securities.

Most of these tokens continued well into the red during the Asia trading day.

Metaverse majors SAND and MANA led the declines, with SAND down 13% to $0.52 and MANA down 11.6% to $0.45. Meanwhile, Binance’s BNB is down 8% to $276.48.

The CoinDesk Market Index (CMI) is flat, down 0.08%.

During the Asia trading day, $26 million in positions were liquidated, according to CoinGlass, with $16.8 million being long positions. This brings the total liquidations in a 24-hour time span to $296.5, with $271 million being long.