The crypto markets mainly shrugged when the SEC sued Binance US - Binance has been exiting the US for the last three years as harassment by American regulators has been steadily increasing. Most of Binance's revenue is generated in Asia.
However the lawsuit by the SEC against Coinbase is different. Coinbase generates 84% of it's revenue in the USA. Coinbase is how most Americans access the crypto world. If Coinbase goes down, crypto in the US "could" face a near-death experience.
Coinbase is going to fight the SEC in the courts, but that might take years. Meanwhile American institutional investors are panic-selling any alt they own which might be deemed a security (though they call it "de-risking" rather than panic-selling).
Old crypto hands will be experiencing deja vu. This is similar to what happened in 2018 when China closed down all it's crypto exchanges.
People at the time were worried about what it meant for crypto. The darkest hour was just before the great bull-run of 2020/21.
Just as China is not the world, the United States is not the world either. Once the panic selling is over, crypto will march on in the rest of the world. In China, crypto went private and peer-to-peer, and the same thing is likely to happen in the USA. Remember, the SEC is targetting exchanges - but crypto doesn't need centralised exchanges to function.
