Justin Sun Looks to Calm Crypto Market Fear as BNB Falls 8%, Withdrawals Continue on Binance

A general sense of unease about the health of Binance continued through the market during the Asian trading hours on Tuesday.

Part of the market’s anxiety over Binance likely came from reports that Tron’s Justin Sun withdrew a combined $50 million from Binance. Sun, however, looked to calm market fears by tweeting a link to Etherscan, showing that he had deposited $100 million in USDC back into the exchange.

On-chain data shows withdrawals across all chains hit the $1.8 billion mark during the last 24 hours. Data from Nansen shows that Paxos and Huobi were the recipients of some of this inflow, with around $162 million of net flow between the two exchanges.

Coinbase saw a sharp rise in inflow, specifically during the Asian trading hours, with around $124 million coming into the exchange during the day.

Binance’s exchange token, BNB, often seen as a barometer of the fortune of the world largest exchange by trading volume, is down 8% on the day to $259, according to CoinGecko.

Data from DeFi Llama shows that the total value locked in Binance Service Chain (BSC) decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols is down 4.5% during the past 24 hours.

Read more: Binance Withdrawals Surge as Concerns About Its Reserve Report Spook Traders

Binance tweeted in the late afternoon Hong Kong time that it was temporarily suspending USDC withdrawals as it engages in a token swap between USDC and BUSD (which is administered by Paxos).

Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao mentioned that part of this swap requires updates to account ledgers at a New York-based bank, which can't be completed until the bank opens for business in the U.S. He also said that Sun's deposit onto Binance was part of the process in deploying BUSD onto TRON.

UPDATE (Dec. 13, 09:00 UTC): Adds comments from Zhao and Binance in seventh and eighth paragraphs.