What's Driving Token Prices? June 14, 2023

SOL/ADA/MATIC (-20%/-16%/-15%) - Following last week’s legal cases against Coinbase and Binance, Robinhood announced on Friday it would delist Solana (SOL), Cardano (ADA) and Polygon (MATIC). The tokens will no longer be available for trading, and users' tokens will be automatically liquidated if tokenholders do not remove their tokens from the exchange by June 27, 2023. While there was no initial impact from the announcement, the market began to sell off in a big way Friday evening based on this news. SOL, ADA and MATIC were the worst performers down 20%, 16% and 15% respectively.
CRV (-19%) - Last week, three prominent venture capital firms launched a lawsuit against Michael Egorov, the founder of Defi protocol Curve. The three firms: ParaFi, Framework Ventures, and 1kx, claimed that they funded the Curve project in 2020 prior to its launch but never received their allocation of tokens or equity. The suit also claims that after accepting $1m in cash, Egorov used that cash to provide liquidity on CRV in order to personally receive a large number of CRV tokens that are now worth a small fortune. The suit will likely take several years as there is another ongoing lawsuit regarding the same issue in Switzerland.
MATIC (-16%) - Layer-2 scaling solution, Polygon, announced plans on Monday for its Polygon v2 upgrade that will be rolling out in stages over the coming months. Although details of their v2 upgrade are brief, it alludes to a scaling architecture similar to Optimism’s OPStack. The announcement was heavily teased on social media with many market participants expecting it to be an airdrop. Although news of the v2 was not as exciting, MATIC managed to reverse its decline following the Robinhood delisting.
XRP (-2.9%) - The market has been waiting anxiously for yesterday’s release of the Hinman documents since it could have a material impact on Ripple’s status as a security. Ripple has been engaged in a legal battle with the SEC for the past year over classifying XRP as a security. Recently, Ripple’s legal team pushed for the release of the Hinman documents, which they believed contained comments that ETH, XRP and other digital assets are not securities. The documents released yesterday are only marginally positive for XRP since the basis for the SEC’s case is predicated on Hinman’s 2018 speech only reflecting his opinion and not SEC’s.

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