Binance intends to support FTX.com in any case.
The situation with agreement Binance and FTX.com has been covered in publications Financial Times и WSJ. The first publication emphasizes that Binance is taking FTX.com’s difficulties seriously, given the implications of the crypto exchange’s possible exit from cryptosphere operations.
It is expected that in the case of this development to all cryptocurrency exchanges in the world will be tougher attitude from regulators: it will become more difficult to obtain permission from them to conduct intermediary services for the purchase and sale of cryptocurrencies, and this attitude cannot fail to worry Binance.
The second publication provides the latest first hours of asset valuation of FTX.com, and based on the information coming in, the likelihood of buying this crypto-exchange is sharply decreasing. At the same time, a growing number of analysts, including the former head of crypto exchange BitMEX, say that FTX.com could be a Lehman Brothers for the crypto-sphere.
The fact is that eight years ago, on September 15, 2008, the investment bank (No. 4 by assets in the U.S. at the time) declared its financial insolvency, which led to a collapse of major indices on Wall Street. The analogy begs to be drawn, as the cryptocurrency market has lost more than $200 billion in investments since the beginning of the week, just after reports of FTX.com’s financial insolvency surfaced.
At the same time, analysts recall that it was the collapse of Lehman Brothers that led US President Barack Obama to utter the important phrase that there are participants in the US financial market that are too big to fail, i.e. too significant to let them go bankrupt, and that they should be supported.
Speaking of FTX.com, the Lehman Brothers example means that FTX.com and its trading arm Alameda are supposed to be supported by some cryptosphere participants, be it Binance, some other crypto exchange or some other organizations and projects related to digital assets.
Such a crisis in cryptocurrency trading may have another dimension: the fact is that the business of crypto-exchanges, which are based for the most part of their revenues on user fees, has been experiencing increasing competition from trading platforms in DeFi for the last two years.
This fact may mean that while the problems that happened to FTX.com may not be impossible to repeat for the foreseeable future with some other crypto exchanges, investors may not be quite willing to buy out such businesses.
It’s worth noting that in the bitcoin mining industry, despite the sagging bitcoin price and the cost of mining equipment, investors apparently willingly buyout some mining companies in financial trouble, seeing their operations as a promising business model.