Binance US Finally Rolls Out Mobile Payments Service to US Customers

Binance’s US subsidiary has implemented a service named “Pay” for US consumers, which its global parent offered to users outside the US in 2021.

Binance US, a cryptocurrency exchange based in the United States, has finally launched its Binance Pay service, 22 months after the global exchange offered the functionality to its users outside the United States in 2021.

The service, which was pushed out a beta form internationally in Feb. 2021 for peer-to-peer payments before extending to include merchant transactions on Mar. 12, lets mobile users of the Binance app to instantaneously transfer almost 150 supported cryptocurrencies without fees.

A blog post from Binance US on December 13 emphasizes that Pay transactions will have no gas or transaction fees, and that the app is now only accessible on mobile while it prepares to launch a web version “in the near future.”

Meanwhile, with recent negative press surrounding Binance worldwide, Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao (CZ) praised the Binance American branch, adding, “Keep developing!”

Binance.US customers will need to upgrade to the current version of the app, go through identification verification, and load their Pay wallet to have access to the new functionalities.

However, the service only supports transactions between Binance US mobile app users. Every 24 hours, users may get up to $1 million in cryptocurrency.

Members in the cryptocurrency community debate a bank run on Binance.

The new statement comes at a difficult time for the global crypto market.

Binance’s Bitcoin balance has dropped by over 42,000 in the previous 24 hours, amounting to $754 million at the time of writing, although the exchange still has a Bitcoin balance in excess of 527,304 BTC, according to on-chain monitoring site Coinglass.

The withdrawals are understood to have followed a Dec. 13 Reuters report that suggested the United States Department of Justice is nearing the end of an investigation into Binance, which commenced in 2018, with U.S. prosecutors reportedly split over whether there is enough evidence to press criminal charges against the exchange and its executives.

Furthermore, there have been new concerns raised in the crypto community about Binance’s finances, with accounting and financial experts consulted by the Wall Street Journal in a Dec. 10 report suggesting that Binance’s proof of reserves raise a number of red flags, while community members fear the worst.

CZ said on Twitter on December 14 that “things seem to have stabilized,” noting that the withdrawals handled yesterday were not even among the top five in the company’s history.