Several cryptocurrency platforms have suspended withdrawals in recent days, victims of the crash of their competitor FTX, the ramifications of which continue to spread.
The last to take action, on Thursday (17), was the French Coinhouse, which confirmed to AFP that it had blocked withdrawals from its cryptocurrency savings product.
In a series of tweets, the platform explained that other associated platforms, to which it lent resources, also stopped its customers’ withdrawals.
It is a domino effect that affects the entire sector, as Coinhouse associates include, for example, Genesis, which delivered cryptocurrencies to Alameda, an FTX fund.
Coinhouse reported “global tensions in the cryptocurrency market and a strain on liquidity.”
Gemini, the flagship of the Winklevoss brothers, best known for their links to the creation of Facebook in the movie “The Social Network”, is in a similar position.
The group, also affected by the difficulties of Genesis, had to freeze its Gemini Earn program, which allows you to place cryptocurrencies in credits for third parties to make a profit.
“The past week has marked a difficult and stressful time for our industry,” Gemini wrote on Twitter.
According to the CoinDesk website, before turning off the tap, Gemini recorded withdrawals of approximately US$ 600 million and deposits of less than US$ 100 million in just 24 hours, a serious imbalance resulting from the nervousness of users, who fear a contagion throughout the world. sector.
BlockFi, another major player in the crypto universe, suspended withdrawals from its entire platform, which managed, at the end of June, around US$ 3.9 billion in more than 650,000 accounts.
“We have significant exposure to FTX,” BlockFi acknowledged. Several American media have indicated that this company could also go bankrupt.
“It’s very disturbing, because we still haven’t seen the size of the contagion”, summarized Francesco Melpignano, general director of Kadena Eco, specialized in blockchain, the system that allows recording all transactions on a platform.
For Melpignano, the FTX earthquake and its aftershocks outweigh the collapse created a few months ago by the implosion of the Terra digital currency, which dragged several exchange platforms, in particular Celsius, into the abyss.
In addition, the expert compares the FTX crash with the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008, which sowed panic in stock exchange markets and infected other banks.
On the other hand, in an interview with the Wall Street Journal, the financial director of Coinbase, one of the giants in the cryptocurrency sector, considered that the business, in its entirety, is not in danger.
“But it will take several days or weeks to measure the contagion that this event caused and understand who was exposed”, explained Alesia Haas.
Although the cryptocurrency sector has been affected, what happened with FTX shows, on the other hand, the extent to which traditional financial markets are hermetic to fluctuations in virtual currencies.
“Some actions [de empresas do setor] were affected […]but this did not compromise the stability of the financial system”, opines Sylvia Jablonski, from Defiance ETFs, for whom the crisis shows that investors prefer regulated markets in the face of an unsupervised cryptocurrency industry.
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