Rats, meet ship

Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange when it comes to volume, today announced it is “pausing” withdrawals from its own USDC magic cryptocurrency accounts after more than $2 billion was withdrawn in the last 24 hours, with $1.14 billion of that coming today.

Changpeng Zhao, the founder of Binance, was the character who started the whole crypto snowball rolling down the proverbial hill when back in November, he announced in a Tweet — because of course he did — that he was selling his holdings in FTX’s digital currency, leading to a run on FTX’s accounts and the same sort of “pause” in withdrawals by FTX customers.

FTX is now in bankruptcy and Sam Bankman-Fried is in jail in the Bahamas awaiting deportation to face charges in the Southern District of New York.

You’re going to love this one. In the world of cryptocurrency, which advertises itself as a place to put your money to get away from the prying eyes of banks and the government, the USDC cryptocurrency is known as a “stablecurrency” because its value is pegged to the U.S. dollar, according to The Observer. And of course what the customers of Binance have been doing over the last 24 hours is converting their holdings of this so-called “stablecurrency” into good old U.S. dollars because, well, U.S. dollars which need to be deposited in banks which are overseen and regulated by the boogeyman U.S. government, are turning out to be just a tad more stable than Binance’s so-called stablecurrency.

So all these cowboy investors who have been putting their money in crypto are running back to the banks and big-momma U.S. government to take care of them.

Meanwhile, Binance has announced that they are unpausing withdrawals of dollars from their USDC accounts because they have successfully done what’s called a “token swap,” which involved swapping one cryptocurrency for another.

Sound like three-card-monte to you? Which cup is the little ball under now, investors?