Sept 27, 2023

Binance has sold its Russian unit as it looks for a complete exit from the market. The buyer CommEx is a crypto exchange that appeared to only launch yesterday, while it seemingly listed BTC/USDT and ETH/USDT trading pairs for spot trading in July. It was reported in May earlier this year that Binance was facing a Department of Justice inquiry into whether Russian customers were able to access the exchange in violation of U.S. sanctions related to Russia's invasion of Ukraine. The firm subsequently said in August that it was cutting ties with sanctioned Russian banks. CommEX said it will not onboard customers from the U.S, EU and some other jurisdictions.

Bitcoin (BTC) and ether (ETH) were little changed in the last 24 hours, amid signs that major cryptos are correlating with U.S. equities. The threat of higher rates for a longer period took hold throughout financial markets, which generally negatively impacts riskier assets. “The positive correlation between cryptocurrencies and the stock market is temporarily back on track,” shared Alex Kuptsikevich, the FxPro senior market analyst, in a note to CoinDesk. “Despite the storm in the equity markets, the crypto market remains subdued, losing only 0.3% in 24 hours to $1.045 trillion.” Crypto markets slumped 0.5%, the CoinDesk Markets Index (CMI), a broad-based tracker of hundreds of tokens, shows. This mirrored a drop in the U.S. markets on Tuesday – with the S&P 500 losing 1.5%, the Dow Jones Index falling 1.1% and the tech-heavy Nasdaq 100 ending the day 1.4% lower.

Shiba Inu ecosystem token bone (BONE) rose around 10% in the last 24 hours amid the otherwise muted crypto markets. BONE exchanged hands at 90 cents in Asian morning hours today. The tokens have a market capitalization of $233 million. Developers had said that the deployer contract for bone tokens was fully “renounced”, thus boosting its security, which may have played a part in trading volume rising some $3 million compared to Monday. Renouncing is when a smart contract’s creator no longer has control over it, removing some fears investors may have of it being manipulated. 

Bitcoin’s implied volatility range has been higher than that of ether for a record 20 days, suggesting traders are increasingly pricing higher volatility in BTC relative to the second-largest crypto by market cap.

The spread between dominant crypto options exchange Deribit's forward-looking 30-day implied volatility index for ether (ETH DVOL) and bitcoin (BTC DVOL) has been consistently negative since Sept. 7, suggesting traders are betting on greater volatility in BTC than ETH in the coming month.

The sustained negative spread is a sign of traders focusing squarely on macroeconomic issues and becoming less interested in trading alternative cryptocurrencies. 

Furthermore, expectations for a U.S.-based spot bitcoin exchange-traded fund keep traders squarely focused on BTC. Ether, meanwhile, has fallen out of favor, thanks to Ethereum's dwindling revenue and renewed inflationary tokenomics.

- Omkar Godbole

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