Binance Holdings Ltd. and its CEO Changpeng “CZ” Zhao are being sued by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission for allegedly violating federal laws and not registering the exchange in the U.S.
The agency filed a complaint against Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange, on Monday in a Chicago federal court. Bloomberg News first reported the suit.
Since 2017, Binance has “taken a calculated, phased approach to increase its United States presence despite publicly stating its purported intent to ‘block’ or ‘restrict’ customers located in the United States from accessing its platform,” the agency argued in the 74-page complaint.
This was despite Binance, Zhao and other executives knowing that soliciting customers in the U.S. without register to business in the country, as required under U.S. law, the CFTC said. The agency also charged Binance’s former Chief Compliance Officer Samuel Lim.
“But Binance, Zhao, and Lim have all chosen to ignore those requirements and undermined Binance’s ineffective compliance program by taking steps to help customers evade Binance’s access controls,” the agency said.
The move comes after crypto service provider Paxos received notice of an investigation into its joint stablecoin offering with Binance and voluntarily ended its minting of the dollar-pegged token.
The price of bitcoin immediately declined on the news, trading down 4% to $26,8871 at 10:39 a.m. EDT.
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Source: https://www.theblock.co/post/223015/cftc-sues-binance?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss