On Monday, the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) charged Binance with fraud and selling unregistered securities. Among other things, the SEC wanted assets on Binance to be frozen. Banks are now refusing to cooperate with Binance’s US subsidiary, Binance.US.
Binance.US is going crypto-only
Binance.US writes this in an extensive message on Twitter. The crypto exchange’s payment partners and banking partners have decided to stop dollar payment paths to and from Binance.US. It seems that they chose this themselves, because Binance.US would pose too much risk to deposits. The stop applies from Tuesday 13 June.
But the US exchange is not giving up. In the announcement, it also states that it will now become a ‘crypto-only exchange’, which means that you can continue to trade cryptocurrencies on the platform and deposit and withdraw coins.
The SEC has taken to using extremely aggressive and intimidating tactics in its pursuit of an ideological campaign against the American digital asset industry. https://t.co/AZwoBOgsqS and our business partners have not been spared in the use of these tactics, which has created… pic.twitter.com/rlIe6swIoY
— Binance.US 🇺🇸 (@BinanceUS) June 9, 2023
Starting next week, USD trading pairs, such as BTC/USD, will also be removed from the platform. Crypto trading pairs will continue to exist, including stablecoin trading pairs such as BTC/USDT. Dollar deposits that are still on the platform next week will be converted to these types of stablecoins.
In any case, all other parts of Binance.US remain fully operational, including the trading section and crypto staking. You could also simply withdraw your coins through the corresponding blockchains in question, and the company would simply continue to hold customer funds on a one-to-one basis. The SEC has also made a problem of strikes for American customers at Coinbase and Kraken, among others, but for now Binance.US does not seem to see a problem in this.
SEC is waging war on crypto
The SEC has clearly dug up the hatchet again. SEC Director Gary Gensler thinks the crypto industry is full of scammers. The market would even be comparable to the US stock market around 1920.
Meanwhile, Binance and Coinbase have both stated that they have nothing to do with rogue trading platforms. Coinbase has also not yet decided whether it will remove the problematic assets from the platform.