Mild recovery

Total global crypto assets, which dipped to $3.27 trillion earlier this week, neared closer to exactly $3.3T as daylight crept across the eastern U.S. Over the past 24 hours, Binance was up considerably, while Ethereum was up slightly, as was XRP. Bitcoin was flat.

Investor confidence seemed to strengthen after inflation news from yesterday — U.S. consumer prices in January jumped 0.5% on a monthly basis, the largest spike in two years — became more fully digested, said The Block, citing an analyst, Min Jung of Presto Research.

As of 9:08 a.m. (EST), BTC was $96,073, down 2.3% versus last week at this time.

One of the biggest gainers we saw this morning was Sonic (S), up 22.2% in 24 hours. A speed-centric layer-1, Sonic is formerly Fantom (FTM). A formal rebranding and 1:1 FTM-for-S token swap were completed last month. Ahead of this transformation, the former FTM token soared to just above $1, an all-time high.

As of this morning, the S token stood for "sixty," as in cents, although we now see the 64th-largest digital asset didn't get there. Its per-token spot price is more like 57 cents. S's market capitalization is now $1.8B, per CoinGecko. Bullish momentum coincides with the Sonic chain achieving a new ATH for total value locked (TVL) yesterday. According to DeFiLlama, Sonic's TVL has crossed $350M. That's 30x what it was only two months ago (Coinspeaker).

Meanwhile, in the world of equities, Robinhood shares spiked yesterday in the wake of the platform's announcement of a year-over-year earnings explosion (+3,000%) fueled by crypto (IBD).

Riot is exploring AI-related partnerships to offset falling BTC mining revenues.

The planned shift owes to a confluence of factors. Mining difficulty on the Bitcoin network has reached a historic high; at the same time, the profitability of mining hardware has dropped to as low as only about $10 a day for an average ASIC unit, like the Antminer S21+ Hydro, according to Hashrate Index.

Riot feeling out of AI opportunities reflects a growing trend among BTC miners to leverage their power infrastructure and data center expertise for additional revenue (Decrypt).

Binance's BNB, fifth-largest token, has gained 22% in the past week even as the rest of the large-cap crowd has been stuck in a rut amidst interest rate uncertainty. BNB's momentum seemingly stems at least in part from the world's largest exchange possibly being on a path toward resolving legal issues.

Over the past few days, the Binance community and crypto denizens at large have honed in on a widely circulated X post from AB Kuang Dong, a Tokyo-based analyst, asserting that the exchange liquidated $5.9B worth of BTC, ETH and SOL over the past month, consolidating reserve assets into an outsized BNB tokenpile.

Refuting the dumping allegations via a statement on X, Binance insisted that what had been observed was merely an internal accounting adjustment. "Binance is not selling assets," an exchange spokesman reemphasized to CryptoSlate.

On-chain data shows Binance did experience 94.1% reduction in its BTC holdings between January and February, per NewsBTC.

"This realignment suggests that the exchange views BNB as a more stable or profitable asset in its treasury, possibly leveraging it to maintain liquidity and bolster confidence in the platform’s ecosystem," said one trader writing on Binance's in-house forum, Binance Square.

Binance utterly dominates worldwide trading volume relative to other centralized exchanges. It captured a 39% market share in 2024 versus a 9% share for the next biggest competitor, Bybit, according to CoinGecko. Almost $19 trillion worth of crypto assets changed hands at CEXs last year.

Meanwhile, Wired this week published new and harrowing details surrounding the case of Tigran Gambaryan, Binance’s former head of financial crime compliance, and who this past October was freed after eight months of detention in a notoriously heinous Nigerian prison.

The 39-year-old Armenian-American — who went to Nigeria for what was supposed to be two days of routine compliance-related dealings with local officials — recounted near-death health deterioration during an ordeal in which he was jailed, charged with bogus money laundering crimes and denied medical care all while being "used as a pawn in the Nigerian government’s efforts to punish Binance for not sharing more information about its customers’ identities and to extract concessions from the company," according to lawyers who helped secure Gambaryan’s release.

Wired's story alleges that Nigerian officials demanded a $150 million bribe to resolve Binance’s regulatory issues. The Nigerian government denied these allegations.

At home in Atlanta, recovering from his nightmare experience — which included bouts with malaria and double pneumonia, as well as a herniated disc in his back — Gambaryan is weighing a potential human rights lawsuit against the Nigerian government.

“I wanted justice," the ex-IRS investigator told Wired. "I still do.”