SOL Risks Crashing Hard as Binance Terminates Trading Pairs for Solana-based Exchange Serum Token

Binance has delisted three Serum (SRM) trading pairs as the effects of FTX’s collapse continue reverberating through the crypto industry. A Friday announcement stated the exchange would “remove and cease trading” for the SRM/BNB, SRM/BTC and SRM/USDT pairs on November 28.

Serum is a Solana-based decentralized exchange protocol built to enable unprecedented speed and low transaction costs to decentralized finance. The protocol has previously enjoyed backing from Alameda Research and FTX since its inception, with the exchange promoting numerous weekly SRM airdrop campaigns for those who hold FTT.

In a November 14 blog post, the Solana foundation disclosed that it held $134.54m in SRM tokens on FTX, raising doubts about the project’s future. The next day, the Serum community forked the project to protect itself from the $400 million FTX hack sending the token up by over 80%. However, this unexpectedly led many DeFi apps and developers to cut ties with the project after speculations that the hack was an inside job, plunging the token’s price again.

Although SRM still enjoys significant trading volume across exchanges Binance, Kraken and Kucoin, its links to FTX have continued to pin its price down. At press time, SRM was trading at $0.23 after plunging by over 4.5% in the past 24 hours. Overall, SRM has lost over 98% of its value from its all-time high, according to the price tracking platform CoinMarketCap.

Meanwhile, as the FTX contagion continues, Solana finds itself in an even tighter space, especially with exchanges cracking down on individual protocols linked to it. It is important to note that many projects on Solana used wrapped assets called “Sollet Assets” as substitutes for Bitcoin, Ether and other non-native crypto-assets. It was believed that Alameda Research backed these assets while FTX issued them. Hence FTX’s collapse sent them into a spiral, leaving the exchange shouldering a handful of protocols with bad debt.

Post the FTX fiasco, a list of exchanges, including Binance, also announced that they were temporarily halting USDC and USDT deposits on the Solana chain. However, some would later resume the service. Cumulatively, these events have placed severe pressure on the price of SOL, which is down over 94% from its all-time high and now risks falling into the single-digit territory. SOL was trading at $13.37 after a 7% drop in the past 24 hours.

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