The crypto market was off its worst levels, but remained down across the board on Tuesday afternoon as risk-off sentiment continued following last weekend’s exploit of Curve Finance and Monday’s court ruling potentially throwing into question June’s legal victory for Ripple’s XRP. Bitcoin (BTC), the top cryptocurrency by market value, slipped 1.2% to $28,890, leading the CoinDesk Market Index (CMI) to a 1.7% decline.
The exploit of Curve Finance caused CRV, its native token, to drop 4% over the past 24 hours to $0.59, before Tron blockchain founder Justin Sun purchased more than $2 million worth of the token and pledged additional assistance through a liquidity pool set up on the Tron network. This caused other prominent decentralized finance coins like COMP, FXS, and AAVE to also dip.
Adding to the market’s woes, a federal judge rejected the distinction made by another judge last month in the Ripple case between public and institutional sales of the payments-focused cryptocurrency XRP. XRP is lower by 1.4%, while the native tokens of Solana, Cardano, Polygon, and Stellar are all down 2%-3%.
Dave Weisberger, the CEO and co-founder of algorithmic-trading platform CoinRoutes, noted that altcoins have been dragged down following the HEX suit, although he added that it involved a misappropriation of funds and did not indicate anything structurally wrong with the broader market. Weisberger also wrote that larger-size buyers seemed to be accumulating Bitcoin as the price recently dropped.