Bitcoin and Ether have 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 Juneteenth.
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and global crypto exchange Binance have reached a temporary agreement, with a federal judge signing off on the deal. The agreement requires Binance.US to take steps to ensure only local employees can access customer funds as the regulator and companies work through an SEC 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 release of the Hinman papers last week in the SEC’s case against Ripple is a boost to Ether (ETH), according to JPMorgan. 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.”