By
Godfrey Benjamin
April 17th, 2024
Antitrust specialists are concerned about how Binance and FTX made the acquisition deal through Twitter first.
Binance, the leading cryptocurrency exchange by services and daily traded volume, through CEO CZ, announced the acquisition of FTX businesses outside the United States on Twitter yesterday. Reportedly, FTX asked Binance to help in a liquidity crunch to protect its customers. Consequently, FTX’s native token has slumped over 70 percent in the last 25 hours to trade around $4.58. As the news unfolds, market strategists fear the deal will draw antitrust concerns from global regulators.
Moreover, FTX is among the top cryptocurrency exchanges by daily traded volume globally, and its acquisition by Binance would kill healthy competition. Nonetheless, CZ and Sam Bankman-Fried are confident the deal is for the better good of the cryptocurrency industry.
5) Because I respect the hell out of what y'all have done to build the industry as we see it today, whether or not they reciprocate, and whether or not we use the same methods.
Including CZ.
Anyway — as always — it's time to build.
Make love (and blockchain), not war.
— SBF (@SBF_FTX) November 6, 2022
Antitrust laws in the United States and the European Union are likely to kick in, as Brandon Kressin, a crypto-focused attorney at boutique antitrust law firm Kressin Law Group noted.
“This [deal is] a textbook horizontal merger of the sort that the antitrust laws in the US and internationally are meant to address,” Kressin said. “I think the apparent hope they have that excluding the US exchanges from the deal will save their deal from antitrust scrutiny is very short-sighted. These are global markets, and the transaction is undoubtedly going to affect the US – and US enforcers have an interest in making sure that the antitrust laws protect US consumers.”
Closer Look at Binance and FTX Deal Under Antitrust Scope
Binance’s CZ and FTX’s Bankman-Fried had been teasing each other for the past few days following yesterday’s acquisition announcement. While BNB and PancakeSwap prices gained value, FTT has dropped to unimaginable levels.
Notably, FTT has a market capitalization of approximately $623,228,755 with a daily traded volume of around $3.7 billion.
On the other hand, BNB has a market capitalization of approximately $52,308,505,092, with a daily traded volume of approximately $1.89 billion. Nonetheless, the entire cryptocurrency market is trending downwards, with Bitcoin price retesting June’s lows of around $18k.
As the cryptocurrency market matures, international regulators are teaming up to regulate the industry. Moreover, the cryptocurrency market is currently highly fragmented, with tokens popping up through complex smart contracts.
Antitrust specialists are concerned about how Binance and FTX made the acquisition deal through Twitter first. Notably, CZ characterized the acquisition as non-binding, which is likely to be the subject of investigations in the coming days.
“You have to give the antitrust authorities a chance to evaluate the transaction first. You can’t just start taking actions that merge the companies and taking actions that you wouldn’t otherwise take, if not for the fact that you’re being merged,” Kressin added.