I see people happy about the impressive rally of bitcoin. I am not. Because that comes in preparation for what was called an 'altcoin winter'.
Why an altcoin winter? Probably regulations crackdown approach in the US, and major exchanges start to take preventive steps in order to keep doing business there. After all, US trading volume is about 30-40% of all, in crypto land, I read somewhere. That's enough for any exchange to forget about what's important for the crypto world, and focus on their fees.
In the following months US citizens will be restricted from investing in a number of alt coins. Not only small ones, but those will be the most affected, because they don't really have other exchanges which list them.
As a direct consequence, funds will be moved towards the top cryptocurrencies that will still be listed on the US markets, or fiat. Primarily bitcoin, maybe etherium, who knows, I would be speculating. And away from the altcoins which will not be accessible to the US citizens.
A few days ago, Binance changed their terms of service, announcing they will prohibit trading on their main platform to US citizens starting from September. And will create a special US-based platform just for them. But to comply with existing and possibly expected changes in regulations (or their interpretation), they decided to remove a long list of alt coins from the new platform, STEEM being among them.
I found the full list in a post by 
@bitcoinflood/steem-along-with-other-altcoins-might-be-in-for-heavy-sell-off
I'm not sure if Binance had any say about the list, but the fact they are removing BNB itself from Binance USA (or how it will be called) shows they were up against the wall.
I've seen another post today about similar measures taken by Bittrex on a much shorter notice (till the end of June), but also a shorter list of coins to be removed for US citizens.
Here's where I found this information:
@kingscrown/bittrex-removes-tokens-for-usa
STEEM and SBD will still be listed for US citizens on Bittrex, according to the information above, but that may change as it appears to be a wave of complying to regulations, whatever they may be.
Have regulators decided to step in and manipulate the market themselves or is it just a coincidence? Remember, bitcoin rose for a few months and then spiked apparently for no reason, and I suspect some already knew what will happen.
