• The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has filed lawsuits against Coinbase and Binance, claiming that ADA is a security.
• This has caused ADA’s price to drop significantly in the past few days, with losses on the week standing at over 20%.
• Input Output Hong Kong (IOHK), the research and development company behind Cardano, has responded defiantly to the SEC’s claims.
The Drop in Cardano’s Price
Cardano / Source: AdobeIt’s been an ugly few days for ADA, the cryptocurrency that powers the Cardano blockchain, a decentralized smart-contract-enabled layer-1 protocol.ADA dropped another near 7% on Friday to hit $0.30 per token and is eyeing a retest of March’s lows.Losses on the week now stand at a staggering more than 20%, which would mark the cryptocurrency’s worst week in over two years.And Cardano price predictions have suddenly become much more bearish.The sharp decline, which has seen ADA decisively lose its grip on its 200-Day Moving Average (which had previously been acting as support), could be the start of a larger move back towards late-2022 lows in the $0.24 area, some technicians think.
SEC’s Security Label
The catalyst for this week’s sharp decline was a double whammy of lawsuits by the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) versus Binance and Coinbase unveiled earlier this week. Both cryptocurrencies stand accused operating as unregistered securities exchanges in the US and one of the securities that they allegedly offered to the US public is ADA.In other words, the SEC is claiming that ADA is a security, and is pushing to have it regulated as such in the US.This is a catastrophe for ADA’s price outlook, hence this week’s sharp decline.That’s because, if ADA is legally viewed as a security, only licensed securities dealers will be able to offer the asset to investors in the US.Cryptocurrency exchanges that wanted to continue offering ADA would be forced to go through a hugely expensive compliance process in order to list to token in the US.And even though the lawsuits versus Coinbase and Binance are yet to play out, cryptocurrency exchanges operating in