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No single day in the crypto terrain goes by without alleged scandals, fraud and good-old-fashioned volatility. While the market is still recovering after the FTX debacle, more clouds are looming over two cryptocurrencies, Fantom and BNB, foreshadowing significant changes.
Fantom has been one of the biggest winners in the past month, surging almost 230%, and BNB was on the way to breaking free from the bear claws. However, as always with crypto, certain powers prevent everyone’s favourite altcoins from reaching hitherto heights. In today’s editorial, we will try to predict what the future holds for both cryptos and see if there is any correlation between the current upward market trajectory, US regulations and money laundering.
Summary
CZ Is Under The CrossFire (Again)
Having approved sending off even more lethal weapons, such as Abrams tanks and F-16 jets, to Ukraine in a benevolent attempt to de-escalate the conflict in Ukraine, Uncle Sam decided to clean up some domestic mess. Namely, the US Department of Justice is strongly considering filing Criminal charges against the CEO of the largest crypto CX, “CZ” Zhao. As always with American hacks of justice, money laundering is involved in the report, which according to the official representative, focused on Binance’s compliance with anti-money laundering laws and sanctions.
Binance under spotlight
Dating back to 2018, this is not the first time Binance has been in the spotlight in the US and worldwide. The alleged facilitation in money laundering has followed Binance and CZ in particular since the early days of the CX. However, there is something off about the current timing, considering that it took the US department more than five years to proceed with the investigation. Whether this is somehow connected to the spying air balloon that hovered over the US nuclear facilities last week. Only later to be shot down by the US military, leading to Mr Blinken postponing its visit to China, remains unclear.
What is clear, though, is how fast most of the CX, with Binance leading the flock. Succumbed under NATO’s peer pressure to ban Russia-related crypto wallets. After all, we should all remember that the fragile state of the world order can only be maintained with continuous weapons. Rising democracies, intimidation of neutral nation-states and, of course, imposed anti-money laundering campaigns unless these are directed at Western countries. This is why the current timing of allegations indicates that, most likely, it is a gentle push of soft power to remind China who is still calling the shots, even when reality presents an entirely different picture. As a result, it is unlikely that BNB will travel south anytime soon and will continue to maintain its position among the top-5 cryptos by market capitalization.
Fantom: Is The Boom Over?
Along with most of the crypto market, Fantom has been doing great. The project, which Andre Cornje co-founded, was steadily rising because of the massive hype surrounding the Twitter messiah of DeFi. And while it seemed that nothing could stop Fantom’s layer-1 blockchain from rising even further, at the time of writing, certain sceptics predict the current trajectory to change anytime.
However, to understand why the five-week rally happened in the first place, we must explain what preceded it. Five weeks ago, Cronje wrote an open letter to the Fantom foundation, giving 13 reasons why Fantom will be one of the best layer-1 blockchains in 2023. His rhetoric on Twitter sparked a lot of interest and positive sentiment from the community, leading to the Fantom boom we are currently experiencing.
While Cronje’s preaching on Twitter laid down some good groundwork for a brief bearish movement to occur in the first place. FTM’s ongoing rally risks exhaustion due to a growing bearish divergence between its rising price and falling momentum. As a general rule of thumb regarding technical analysis, such an apparent discrepancy means a massive chance for the upside momentum to be slowing down.
*This article was paid for. Cryptonomist did not write the article or test the platform.
