Bitcoin slipped below the $70,000 mark on Thursday as a $1.2 billion forfeiture action tied to a Binance hack and a fresh stablecoin settlement arrangement at Visa kept digital-asset traders on the defensive.
The largest cryptocurrency fell 4.19% over 24 hours to $69,263 as of 14:13 UTC on Nov. 13, extending a weekly loss to 8.49%, according to CoinGecko data cited in market coverage. Its 24-hour range ran from $67,922 to $72,091. Ether dropped 2.07% to $1,963.79 and has shed 12.04% over seven days. XRP traded at $1.03 and Solana at $81.29, each up 0.29% on the day but down 13.08% and 9.58% respectively over the week. BNB changed hands at $640.77, a 24-hour decline of 2.05%.
Sentiment gauges reflected the gloom. Alternative.me's Crypto Fear & Greed Index stood at 20, a reading classified as Extreme Fear on a scale where zero represents maximum panic and 100 maximum greed.
Note: Prices and changes as of 14:13 UTC on Nov. 13; weekly figure for BNB was not provided.
On the enforcement front, the Department of Justice is moving to seize $1.2 billion connected to proceeds from a hack of Binance, according to a Cointelegraph report. Authorities have already frozen more than $2.7 billion tied to the same incident. The reporting did not identify the people involved, describe the court process or set a timeline for any final forfeiture, and the action should not be read as a completed recovery or as a commitment to reimburse affected users.
Separately, research attributed more than $400 million in losses over 18 months to a scheme known as FaceStealer. That matter is distinct from the Binance case, and the two sets of figures should not be combined.
In payments, Visa now allows eligible businesses to settle obligations on its VisaNet network using USDPT, a stablecoin issued and custodied by Anchorage Digital Bank, according to a Decrypt report from Nov. 12. The token is identified as Western Union's. The arrangement covers settlement between Visa and qualifying partners rather than everyday card payments, and the reporting did not specify which companies qualify or how broadly the option will be used. Anchorage operates as a federally chartered digital-asset bank.
Among corporate developments, shares of Strategy fell Thursday after index provider MSCI decided to remove the company from its benchmarks, Cointelegraph reported on Nov. 12. The stock move coincided with the wider crypto selloff, and the available reporting did not give an effective date for the index change or quantify resulting fund flows, leaving the scale of any impact on index-tracking products unresolved.
JPMorgan added 224,545 Strategy shares in the third quarter and reported holdings of 11.4 million shares in BlackRock's Bitcoin ETF, according to The Block. The White House also named nominees for vacancies at the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, including a possible successor to Hester Peirce; the candidates were not identified in the reporting.
On the network side, Ethereum developers are targeting quantum resistance by 2027, CryptoNews reported. BTCS, a Nasdaq-listed company, sold ether below its purchase price while carrying $64.1 million in outstanding debt on the Aave lending protocol.
The combination of a criminal-forfeiture headline and a pullback in the two largest tokens puts the market's near-term direction in the hands of sentiment rather than fundamentals. A Fear & Greed reading of 20 has historically coincided with thin buying interest, and the absence of a stated recovery path for hack victims leaves Binance-linked exposure difficult to price. For payments companies, Visa's limited stablecoin rollout is a test case: it settles obligations between institutions, not consumer purchases, so its effect on card economics will depend on how many partners opt in. Strategy's removal from MSCI benchmarks, meanwhile, matters most for passive funds that track those indexes, though the size of any rebalancing flow has not been disclosed.
