Cryptocurrency king is facing dramatic losses today as overnight price action shows that the Bitcoin prices dropped over 6% today. While some investors are booking profit but Hodlers know that they should not be selling their bitcoin to whales as the future looks much brighter as bad actors are getting punished
Upon hearing the verdict of US legislators, crypto traders breathed a sigh of relief. Sam Bankman-Fired, the inventor of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX and the mastermind behind the largest fraud in the industry, was sentenced to an extended prison term. Two meme currencies created particularly for the occasion experienced significant pump-and-dump activity during the event, while the founder of the FTX was sentenced to 25 years in prison.
As legislators tighten their grip and more and more regulations are introduced and implemented, there remains optimism that the cryptocurrency industry will become more hygienic. This is due to the fact that institutional traders primarily concentrate on Bitcoin, the "religious" cryptocurrency, although other major coins are likely to be incorporated into this equation in the future.
Background
Sam Bankman-Fried, who was once known as a positive and prominent figure in the cryptocurrency space, particularly as the founder of FTX Exchange and Alameda Research, for his contributions to the development of crypto trading platforms and his involvement in various philanthropic endeavors, was sentenced to 25 years in prison for pulling the biggest fraud in crypto history.
In November 2022, the empire built by Bankman came under crushing pressure when reports started to linger that customer funds worth $10 billion were missing. A year after the event, a jury convicted him of fraud and money laundering when most of his close allies turned against him. Now, “SBF” is facing a very long time in prison, as the judge gave him a lengthy prison sentence of 25 years yesterday and a fine of $11 billion.
Speculation
The irony is that there still seems to be no shortage of investors who are still falling for bad actors and hoping that one meme coin will be their ticket to the yacht that they have been dreaming about. Yesterday, a few hours before the verdict from the judge, Lewis Kaplan launched a meme coin, ticker FTX, and the meme coin surged 23,300%, with the market cap surging above $1.5 million as per DexScreener data. As always, the meme coin crashed more than 85% in almost three hours, leaving many with a bag full of trash.
The issue here continues to remain the same, which is that some investors continue to fall for the meme coin tokens, which are worthless and have no fundamentals at all.
Wild West Days
The hope is that investors will learn something from the demise of FTX and how its founder pulled a scam that has been dubbed the biggest fraud of the crypto industry. Secret back doors were established that allowed his other company, Alameda Research, to push the valuation of assetless investments into wild west territory. But investors and entrepreneurs are hopeful that the era of wild west days is coming to an end as the SEC tightens its grip.
Alex Konanykhin, the CEO of Unicoin, an assets-backed, publicly reporting, audited, and regulation-compliant cryptocurrency, said that, just like the aftermath of the impact of a huge asteroid killing off dinosaurs, the aftermath of the FTX implosion will include the gradual demise of assetless, opaque, and volatile cryptocurrencies of the First Wave. The wild west days of crypto predictably resulted in massive fraud and losses to millions of investors, triggering a higher level of enforcement by the SEC. Audited, publicly reported, regulation-compliant, asset-backed cryptocurrencies like Unicoin will be the new standard, especially for institutional and value investors.
The New Days
With the verdict of SBF behind us now, I believe that traders and investors should focus more on those assets that are actually backed by real assets or have mass adoption, like bitcoin. BlackRock’s first Spot Bitcoin ETF not only opened up the doors for other institutions to join the ever-growing race, but it has also opened the doors for real-term use cases of tokenization of assets. BlackRock (NYSE:BLK), the first tokenized fund on the Ethereum blockchain, attracted $245 million in deposits in its first week, which again has inspired other major institutions to come to the space.
I believe that Bitcoin’s spot ETF was actually only the beginning of the process of institutions getting involved in the space with all legal matters in check; the real focus is the tokenization of assets. Due to the fact that BlackRock has experienced a great deal of interest, investors who are either liquidity-strapped or investors would explore other similar ways of using blockchain and fully comply with SEC regulations. For instance, Unicoin growth strategy includes innovative fundraising strategies like its Buy Now, Pay Later program and its 140% program, which offer real estate owners the opportunity to use their properties to acquire cryptocurrency.
To conclude, with lawmakers making a good example of SBF for bad actors and bitcoin sitting on the balance sheets of major institutions, the space is prime to grow where investors will explore more compliant ways of raising funds while the future for the bitcoin price looks ever more promising.