The biggest cryptocurrency exchange in the world wants to settle open inquiries with American regulators.
Binance, the biggest exchange for digital assets in the world, is getting ready to pay fines and penalties to resolve pending regulatory and law enforcement investigations in the US.
Patrick Hillmann, the company’s chief strategy officer, was quoted in a WSJ article from the 15th of February as saying that Binance has been collaborating with regulators to address previous compliance difficulties.
Binance is “working with regulators to figure out what are the remediations we have to go through now to make up for that,” according to Hillmann.
He continued, saying “it is up to regulators to determine,” that the conclusion of ongoing investigations will probably be fines, but they “may be more.”
In the United States, Binance has been the focus of numerous investigations, including one that the Department of Justice launched in 2018 to look into possible anti-money-laundering legislation violations.
The Commodities Futures Trading Commission looked into whether the business sold cryptocurrency futures to American clients without first registering with the organization in March 2021.
In February of last year, the Securities and Exchange Commission opened an investigation into Binance’s U.S. subsidiary over trading entities linked to CEO Changpeng Zhao.
Paxos was targeted by New York officials earlier this week, prohibiting it from continuing to issue more of the BUSD stablecoin with the Binance name.
After SEC enforcement action, U.S. cryptocurrency exchange Kraken was given a $30 million fine and told to stop offering staking services last week.
Patrick Hillmann came to the conclusion that settling differences with US regulators would benefit the company and its prospects.
That will be a positive turning point for our business because it enables us to move past the incident.
Binance declined to provide any more commentary to the conversation.
Hillmann went on to say that Binance was “very confident and feeling pretty optimistic about the direction those negotiations are going,” but he was unable to estimate the sum of the penalty or a deadline for reaching an agreement with American regulators.
It is a “very perplexing time for us,” he said, citing the lack of clarity surrounding crypto in America.
The SEC has recently intensified what some in the industry refer to as a “war on crypto,” which appears to target specific stablecoins and staking services that it has determined to be subject to securities regulations.
The executive of Binance stated in reference to the latest enforcement action that it “would have a tremendously significant and long-lasting chilling effect on the United States.”
