BINANCE BUZZ: There’s been a lot of news over the past week on the big U.S. crypto exchange – some of it good, some not so good, some neutral. The overarching theme is that the company expanded rapidly in recent years, and now it’s facing intense scrutiny from regulators, having to retrench in some business lines and regions, while pivoting in others. Binance this week cut ties with five sanctioned Russian banks listed on the exchange’s peer-to-peer service for transferring funds in rubles. The move came just days after the Wall Street Journal reported that Binance was enabling peer-to-peer trades of rubles for digital tokens, frequently involving banks on Western blacklists – a popular method for Russians to transfer money abroad. Binance said it was discontinuing its crypto-backed debit card in Bahrain and Latin America, where it has been available for less than a year. According to Reuters, Mastercard decided to end the programs. Then on Tuesday, Binance announced it had launched a new crypto-based program Send Cash that will allow users in nine Latin American countries to transfer money directly into friends’ and family members’ bank accounts in Colombia and Argentina. In Belgium, Binance has been ordered to cease operations by the country’s local regulator, but customers can continue using the exchange via a Polish entity. On the trading side, Binance announced that, starting Wednesday, it would offer “T+3” daily options contracts allowing traders to bet on the BNB token over a three-day period. The BNB token has been volatile this year, falling recently to a one-year low (get update on this). Market observers have long speculated that Binance might attempt to prop up the token’s value by selling bitcoin (BTC), but exchange CEO Changpeng “CZ” Zhao has said it wasn’t the case. Binance and Zhao were sued by the SEC in June, accused of offering unregistered securities to the general public allowing for commingling of customer funds, along with other violations of securities laws. ByteTree, a research firm, wrote this week that Binance was “in the crosshairs,” adding that its share of global crypto exchange trading volume has slid to about 45%, from 64% six months earlier.
