First Mover Americas: Bitcoin Trades Flat, Altcoins Nurse Losses

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Bitcoin held steady over the weekend, with altcoins continuing to lag behind. Bitcoin traded between $26,200 and $26,300 and ether, starting the weekend around $1,700, remains the same. Altcoins, however, underperformed bitcoin and ether, with Chainlink’s LINK, Cosmos’ ATOM and NEAR Protocol’s NEAR all losing 3% over the last 24 hours. U.S. markets are closed today, with the New York Stock Exchange and the Nasdaq Stock Market shut in observance of Junteenth.

A federal judge signed off on a temporary agreement between the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, global crypto exchange Binance and its U.S. affiliate to have Binance.US take steps to ensure only local employees can access customer funds as the regulator and companies work through an SEC lawsuit. The parties announced a deal late Friday to ensure that only Binance.US employees can access customer funds in the short term, which Judge Amy Berman Jackson of the District Court Columbia signed early Saturday. The judge also ordered the parties to suggest timelines for the broader lawsuit. According to the proposed agreement, Binance.US will take steps to make sure that no officials from Binance Holdings, the global exchange, have access to private keys for wallets or hardware wallets, or root access to Binance.US' Amazon Web Services tools. The U.S.-based crypto trading platform will share detailed information about its business expenses, including estimated costs, in the coming weeks.

The release of the Hinman papers last week in the SEC's case against Ripple is a boost to ether (ETH), and is likely to trigger a move to more decentralization in the crypto market, JPMorgan said in a research report Thursday. Emails tied to former SEC Director of Corporation Finance William Hinman’s 2018 speech saying ether did not look like a security were published last Tuesday by Ripple in its defense against an SEC lawsuit. Senior leadership at the SEC did not rank ether as a security in 2018, the report noted, and SEC officials acknowledged that the “fact that tokens on a sufficiently decentralized network are no longer securities creates a regulatory gap."