Last April 2019, cryptocurrency exchange giant Binance officially announced its decision to delist Bitcoin SV (BSV) from its exchange. Within hours of the announcement, exchanges Kraken and Shapeshift followed suit. This pivotal event came as a result of ensuing libel claims by Bitcoin creator Dr. Craig Wright, the man behind the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto and author of the Bitcoin whitepaper.
This decision by Binance and others initially took a significant toll on BSV as Binance was the third-biggest market for Bitcoin SV in the BCHSV/USDT trading pair. At the time of the delisting, the trading volume was more than $9 million in the last 24-hour period, according to CoinMarketCap. The delisting of Bitcoin SV caused the price of the cryptocurrency to fall by 9%.
On January 14, 2020, a rapid rise of 43% in gains for Bitcoin SV was recorded in 24 hours, making Bitcoin SV the best performing coin among the top 50 cryptocurrencies by market capitalization. Currently, BSV, ranked fifth by market capitalization, trades at around US$285 at the time of publishing. For a brief time, Bitcoin SV surpassed BCH in market capitalization before settling into the Top 5 in market capitalization, outdoing well known blockchains Tether, Litecoin, and EOS.
These numbers are intended to reflect the performance of Bitcoin SV on the global exchange market. It is essential to recall the importance of trading to the growth of both cryptocurrencies and Bitcoin exchange when contemplating delisting. While the Bitcoin SV ecosystem prefers to focus on its groundbreaking tech and rapidly growing ecosystem, it is worth noting what the BSV token has been able to achieve despite the coordinated attack against it. Many wonder what the token’s value would be today if it were allowed to trade in circulation on all exchanges, giving all tokens a fair and equal chance.
The recent surge in the market capitalization of Bitcoin SV proves the capacity of Bitcoin to continue leading the market. Considering this, it is clear that delisting Bitcoin SV only hurts the exchanges as there are several investors, miners, and ventures that continue to work for and with Bitcoin SV all around the world. Critics continue to voice how this decision from Binance and others sets a bad precedent not only for the thriving cryptocurrency industry as a whole but also from the regulatory and legal conflicts that will inevitably arise from this.
There is criticism aimed at exchange CEOs arguing that they should not be using personal biases about individual backers of any asset to be of significant influence to corporate decisions. Doing so would open the market up to very easy market manipulation in the future for very personal sentiments. An analogy often used by critics to illustrate the absurdity of the situation would be comparing it to the CEOs of stock exchanges. Leaders of the stock exchange would be quickly condemned if they would delist big companies such as Amazon or Facebook due to personal concerns of its backers. Such matters are trivial within the trading platform, which must prioritize only the assets of any listed company and allow for liberal trading for all.
Because of this, many critics continue to call for even greater regulatory oversight for exchanges. These unprecedented moves not only can negatively impact the trading capacities of Bitcoin SV but have set both an uncertain and unregulated precedent for future listing matters within exchanges. In addition, it is crucial to include in the discussion the topic of business ethics. The extent to which colluding exchanges put personal bias into their financial decisions hurts the business interest of the exchange’s customers and shareholders.
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