The cryptocurrency market has slumped since the bear market started in November 2021. This worsened in January 2022 when the U.S. central bank started raising interest rates aggressively to fend off inflation. This caused the U.S. dollar to soar and sent the price of crypto crashing with a drop in NFT sales and turmoil in DeFi projects. There is still no clear sign of a bottom in markets after some mild rallies and continued selling. Recent news from the NFT marketplace was the SEC screws BAYC (Bored Ape Yacht Club) creator Yuga Labs for securities violations. The regulator was studying the project to see if the release of the ApeCoin and also some airdropped NFTs were like securities and should be regulated like stocks. This could add a headwind to the market for blue-chip NFTs in the coming weeks and months. Most NFTs have no underlying tie to real-world assets and would be at the mercy of a further market downturn.
An anonymous source tipped Bloomberg that the Securities and Exchange Commission is currently investigating whether NFTs sold by Yuga Labs, the $4 billion company behind the Bored Ape Yacht Club, violated security registration laws. The SEC did not deny the report.
Depending on who you ask, the news confirmed a likelihood of once unthinkable or inevitable: the U.S. government may be seeking to regulate the nascent, multi-billion dollar NFT industry as a securities market.
Multiple legal experts, in speaking to Decrypt, took the development as a clear signal that the SEC screws BAYC—which has aggressively ramped up its attitude towards crypto and NFT regulations in recent months—is taking unprecedented steps towards asserting its dominion over the virtual art market. Other legal minds dismissed the move as loud but empty political jockeying on the part of the SEC—one that is unlikely to lead to any dramatic changes in regulation.
Because ApeCoin is a top 50 cryptocurrency by market capitalization, many analysts, gurus, and experts believe that ApeCoin should be considered a good investment in comparison to other coins. Despite the ups and downs in the young price history of APE, analysts think ApeCoin's price could grow substantially in the long term. Some of the factors that will influence investing in ApeCoin in 2022 is having the backing of all the cryptocurrency exchanges and stakeholders in the decentralized finance space.
When Statista publishes its periodical report on the biggest cryptocurrency exchanges by trading volume, certain platforms are always present. Some of these exchanges are eToro, Binance, Coinbase Pro, Huobi Global, OKX, FTX, Gate.io, Kraken, and BitMart. Most of them record a minimum trading volume of $1 billion daily. What is interesting is that all the aforementioned exchanges announced support for APE on/or before the launch of the protocol and its cryptocurrency on March 17, 2022. This means that APE is not only accessible on many exchanges but available on thousands of markets.
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