Today in Crypto: Binance, FTX Grow During Selloff; Crypto Beginners Regret Listening to Friends, Family

Spanish banking multinational Santander will begin offer crypto trading for its Brazil clients, according to Santander Brazil CEO Mario Leao.

“We recognize that it is a market that is here to stay, and it is not necessarily a reaction to competitors positioning themselves,” Leao said, per a CoinDesk report Thursday (July 28). “It is simply a vision that our client has demand for this type of asset, so we have to find the most correct and most educational way to do it.”

The decision comes as Santander has already made inroads with crypto in Latin America, having rolled out loans in Argentina earlier this year for farmers.

Furthermore, bitcoin and ether will likely have their best month all year, with a revival of risk appetite and optimism about an Ethereum upgrade.

Bitcoin is up 26% in July and ether is 65%, though the rallies were paused on Friday (July 29), Bloomberg reported.

That comes as there’s still a U.S. economic slowdown that has seen investors viewing the Federal Reserve interest rate raises as a temporary thing to be done by the end of the year. The report noted the Fed may pivot to cutting borrowing costs by 2023.

Meanwhile, Binance and FTX are extending their reach during the continued market rout, with Binance’s spot-trading market share sitting at 49.7% as of June, up from 45% in January, according to CryptoCompare data.

The Wall Street Journal reported Friday that FTX saw its market share hitting 8.95% in June, up from 6% in January, as the company has been aggressive in marketing and acquisitions.

In other news, former Voyager Digital executive Shingo Lavine has been considering a competing restructuring plan, which would cut out existing management and take the platform away from its lending business, Bloomberg wrote Friday.

Lavine, along with his father and another Voyager shareholder, were looking at the broad strokes of the proposal in a recent bankruptcy court filing.

Lavine left Voyager in early 2021 due to disagreements over the direction of the company. His version of the company doesn’t lend crypto and is focused more on digital asset trading and customer security, and lawyers for Lavine said Voyager hasn’t been amenable to the proposal thus far.

As that’s happening, ether might be making surprising gains that could see it gaining on bitcoin as the top cryptocurrency.

That has seen fans saying it might take the throne someday soon, per a Bloomberg report Sunday (July 31). Crypto slang has it known as the “flippening,” which is still a ways off if it’ll ever happen — the market value of the coin is still less than half the size of bitcoin’s.

In further crypto news, Bloomberg wrote Saturday (July 30) that many recent crypto crash victims can cite the influence of family or friends as reasons why they got into their current situation.

The report noted that crypto lost around $2 trillion in market value since bitcoin was at a high last November. A survey by the U.K. financial regulator from October said three quarters of investors under 40 cited competition with people they knew as a big reason they put money into crypto.

Finally, a new stablecoin lending project on the Binance Smart Chain Network, SMARTLend, will help investors get more financial and time freedom, according to a report from CryptoNews.

SMARTLend, as a ROI decentralized application (DApp), will come with features allowing participants to stake any amount above 5 BUSD, USDT, USDC or DAI, and they can withdraw the profit without any fee. Participants will get 1.5% daily for 70 days, and the principal will then be returned.

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