Calmly, crypto carries on

Brutal fallout – from an intensified SEC crackdown targeting the most enormous exchanges and a parade of popular coins – keeps spreading. Crypto continues to largely shrug it off.

Bitcoin as of Friday at 8:09 a.m. (EST) was +0.8% in 24 hours. BTC crept close to $26,800 as of yesterday shortly before noon. A $26.6K handle has been on the books for the better part of the past five hours. The second-largest crypto, Ethereum, registered a 24-hour gain. Okay, barely (+0.1%). Last we checked, ETH was about $1,845.

Solana, among the altcoins singled out by the SEC, has gained 1.3% in the past 24 hours. Most solidly green among Big Ten denizens is XRP, up 2.5%.

Surviving in a spectacularly bleak environment with the fortitude of a rancher in remote southern Chile, the total crypto market rose 0.5% in 24 hours, per CoinGecko.

"It's hard to imagine a tougher regulatory situation facing the digital asset industry in the U.S. than what’s happening right now,” Censo's CEO, Andrew Lawrence, told CoinDesk. “And yet there’s been a tremendous resilience shown by key crypto assets."

In the wake of the SEC's bid to try to freeze its assets and with key banking partners preparing to bail, Binance.US is halting U.S. dollar withdrawals and deposits.

Binance's native BNB, fourth-largest coin, fell 1.6% to $260.75.

Among Big Ten assets, only Cardano had a worse 24-hour period. Cardano's ADA fell 2.7% to $0.318163, per CoinGecko.

This week will be remembered for a barrage of SEC complaints against the world's two biggest exchanges, Binance and Coinbase. In the suits, the federal agency also takes aim at a slew of cryptos, including ADA, deemed securities, unlawful ones at that.

Cardano’s development company, IOG, released a statement asserting that the SEC's claim is completely off base.

“Under no circumstances is ADA a security under U.S. securities laws," IOG said. "It never has been.”

A few months ago, Blur bested OpenSea in terms of non-fungible token (NFT) trading volume. Now Blur is leading the way in a related area: peer-to-peer perpetual lending.

Early last month, the Ethereum-based NFT platform released Blend, a protocol that allows users to borrow ETH by posting NFTs as collateral, part of a fast-moving trend within the burgeoning “NFTfi" space, as Decrypt explained. 

It's only been one month but Blur's Blend already has captured more than four-fifths of total NFT lending volume across all industry platforms, having facilitated some $300 million in loans, according to The Daily Hodl, citing DappRadar.

The next largest competitor is X2Y2 (with $20 million in loan volume, or 5.5% of the market).

DeFi Lllama said Blur is the No. 1 NFT marketplace (overall volume) with roughly 55% of the market. The second-largest platform, OpenSea, captured less than half that amount (19.55%).

Blur's native BLUR token rocketed in the days following its February airdrop, hitting a record high of $1.38.

But BLUR has faltered in recent months, begging the kind of question one might overhear at a limbo contest ("seriously, how much lower?).

CoinGecko ranks BLUR as the 163rd-largest digital asset. As of Friday morning, at 7:30 a.m. (EST), BLUR's market capitalization was roughly $200 million. BLUR has been below a buck since March. In mid-April, BLUR flirted with $0.80. BLUR is down 13% over the past two weeks. CoinGecko pegs an all-time low of $0.413627 as having occurred only just yesterday. BLUR did rebound 1.76% in the one day since its nadir.