- Malta-based Binance to discontinue crypto trading services for verified U.S.-based customers
- This comes following the news that it had partnered with a fintech firm to launch an exchange in the U.S.
- BNB price takes a slight hit
According to a report by The Block published June 14, 2019, major cryptocurrency exchange Binance is mulling discontinuation of trading services for its U.S.-based individual and corporate customers come September.
Binance to Support U.S. Customers with a New Exchange
In a major development within the global crypto space, Malta-based cryptocurrency exchange Binance has announced that from September 12, 2019, it will discontinue services for its U.S.-based customers. Notably, at present, U.S. customers make up about 15 percent of Binance’s total user traffic.
It’s worth highlighting that this figure used to hover around 30 percent mark earlier but since the foray of hundreds of cryptocurrency exchanges into the industry, Binance’s market share has somewhat dropped.
“Users who are not in accordance with Binance’s Terms of Use by September 12 will continue to have access to their wallets and funds, but will no longer be able to trade or deposit on Binance.com,” the official post by Binance reads in part.
The announcement is not expected to have much of an impact on non-verified U.S.-based customers of Binance who will likely still be able to operate on the exchange through VPN services. Currently, Binance allows withdrawal of 2 BTC without any verification.
That said, the exchange’s U.S.-based customers won’t really be bogged down by the development as just a day ago, Binance announced that it had partnered with BAM Trading Services to officially enter the U.S. crypto market and give Coinbase a run for its money.
Binance CEO, Changpeng Zhao, commented on the development saying:
There will be a few restrictions on https://t.co/9rMMAmtCxH accompanying this. But some short term pains may be necessary for long term gains. And we always work hard to turn every short term pain into a long term gain. https://t.co/gl1M1cwPYB
— CZ Binance (@cz_binance) June 14, 2019
Unsurprisingly, the rather discouraging tone of the news had a knee-jerk impact on the price of Binance’s native cryptocurrency BNB. At press time, BNB trades at $32.59 as seen on crypto analytics website CoinMarketCap – having slumped some 8 percent in the last 24 hours.
However, experts opine that chances of the digital token sliding further down are slim as the current market price has fully absorbed the U.S. operations discontinuation development.
It would seem that Binance is giving no reasons to regulatory watchdogs to come bite it in the future for unprofessional or unethical behavior, especially since the exchange fell victim to a well-schemed hack attack which resulted in the loss of about $40 million worth of bitcoin (BTC).