And Coinbase has 100 million users and is either unprofitable or barely profitable. FTX had tons of users with an attached hedge fund and lost $9 billion, etc. I think Binance's economic edge derives (or derived, until today) from being the no-KYC/no-AML alternative to the regulated developed markets exchanges like COIN, along with being a bagman for Tether. These businesses have for all intents and purposes been shut down (or will be shortly) and the company will be effectively run by the US Treasury and DOJ. I'll specifically predict that volume and activity on Binance will collapse and either vanish entirely (wash trading of shitcoins etc which was phantom to begin with) or migrate to even shadier operators in Russia and the like. It's pretty clear that the near-future crypto economy boils down to collecting transaction fees on BTC/ETH trades, and custody services on behalf of ETFs. There are of course no lock-ins or network effects as with CME/ICE since BTC can be traded anywhere. It's going to be a shitty low-margin business, like running an ECN or something, with a substantially heavier compliance burden.
Do you believe everything you read? Is it the banks fault someone used money from their account to hire a hitman?
Failure to utilize basic internal KYC (Know Your Customer) / AML (Anti Money Laundering) standards violates a host of laws across many countries. The typical penalty for wide-scale deliberate failure is the shutting down of the financial institution.
So far. What if the DOJ just used the easy charges to get him to come to the US, and they are going to hit him with the bigger charges later on? Apparently brokerages aren't those money printing machines like casinos. And then you have billions of customers' money just sitting there and "number go up". So it is an easy and obvious choice to invest the unused money into crypto and the rest you can guess. My guess is that this 4 B fine is big enough to finish Binance off. Also, the smart leadership already have ran away, so anybody who touches the CEOship must be a moron.
This just looks so bad. I don't know to laugh or not. So by PROOF, Binance has no backing what-soever in their reserves, except for an empty Tether chest that is itself not backed by anything but (we hope) supposedly shit-coins, because an un-audited corporation of fraudsters says Tether is backed. Uh...huh. And the only thing else Binance has backing in their proof of reserves is a tiny bit of their OWN token they made. Uh...huh. How on earth does someone not see the spark going off here at some point? It will make WTI contracts going to -37 look like a walk in the park when the run to the exits happens.
What nobody seems to have stepped back and thought about is that running a crypto exchange is a brutally cutthroat competitive business. CME and ICE have network/lock-in effects where if you want to trade NQ futures or wheat futures or whatever, you have to go to their venue and pay the associated extortionate/monopoly data fees; but crypto is fungible, one exchange is just like any other, apart from stuff like the software front-end and of course the Tx fees. So you have a situation where legit venues like COIN are losing money, hoping to be last man standing when the VC funding runs out and exchange fees rise to balance costs, while offshore venues like FTX, Binance et al are either also losing money or recouping said losses through frauds or scams of one type or another - simple theft in the case of FTX, or shitcoin pumps and bagman fees for Binance. Either way, there's no prospect that any of these operations will ever see more than razor-thin profits, on a legit basis, simply by servicing the BTC hodler ecosystem.
Well, nobody is forcing anyone to start a new brokerage. But if we are right and being a broker isn't such a good business that pretty much just forces them to act like an investment bank, using the traders' money. And since they are such a fan of crypto, they are most likely to invest in crypto business, just like Alameda did. And we know how eventually those crypto business turned out. Long story short, it is almost inevitable that most crypto brokers go bankrupt or commit fraud eventually.
I had a bad experience with Binance. It really stings to lose $10,000 like I did; it's just disheartening that some people choose to play dirty. Luckily, enverracapital . io stepped in and professionally helped me recover the funds. Let's all watch our backs online and hope others can avoid these kinds of headaches.