Binance, the largest and most popular cryptocurrency exchange by volume, has joined forces with the Malta Stock Exchange to create a digital securities trading exchange.
Binance Pushes for Global Dominance
As revealed by the Times of Malta, the two exchanges hope to leverage Binance’s towering position in the cryptocurrency space with the stock exchange’s solid reputation and record of regulatory compliance to create an exchange that can bridge the gap between traditional securities exchanges and the crypto sphere.
The main hurdle for many mainstream investors eyeing crypto is not how slow it often is to purchase your first crypto or how steep the learning curve is to get used to wallets and sending money between exchanges – through these issues certainly don’t help either. But the main problem for many is the perceived lack of legitimacy that comes with crypto’s regulatory limbo and the lack of trusted mainstream institutions in the space.
Even Binance, the favorite exchange of almost everyone in crypto right now, has moved jurisdictions several times rather than open up its books to regulators and demanding KYC from traders. Binance finally settled on Malta and the EU, which for now is in no rush to regulate the space.
At the same time, many projects in crypto are neither willing nor able to deal with the regulations that most other issuers of financial assets have to take for granted. We are a very young space yet, and many of the most significant projects ballooned up without regulatory oversight or strict rules about insider trading, wash trading, and so on.
The Benefits of Regulation
Nevertheless, for many potential investors, especially larger institutions, the lack of transparency and regulation is a massive obstacle to investment. To bridge the gap between these investors and traders in crypto, Binance is now teaming up with a more traditional stock exchange to create a trading platform for those digital assets that do fall under securities.
Most crypto tokens do not – at least if you ask the teams behind them, but many experts from traditional financial institutions believe that sooner or later this will change as regulators grow more familiar with crypto and force most tokens into the molds of established financial regulations. As space matures, we are also likely to see more and more projects come willingly to ask to be treated as securities.
All in all, this is an exciting development, and a hint at brighter days to come, even if the market does not always look like it. It’s a good day for crypto today.
