Cryptocurrency exchange Binance will temporarily suspend U.S. dollar bank transfers beginning Wednesday (Feb. 8).
The company announced the move in a Monday (Feb. 6) post on Twitter, adding that only a small proportion of its users will be affected by this, that the firm is working to restart the service “as soon as possible” and that all other methods of buying and selling crypto on the exchange are unaffected.
Shortly afterwards, Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao reiterated these points in a post on Twitter.
“It is worth noting that USD bank transfers are leveraged by only 0.01% of our monthly active users,” Zhao said in the post. “However, we appreciate that this is still a bad user experience and the team is working on quickly resolving this issue.”
Neither Zhao nor the company gave a reason for the suspension.
In a reply to Binance’s tweet, and in response to questions from users, Binance.US said it is only Binance.com that is making that move.
“We are NOT suspending $USD withdrawals & deposits on February 8,” the account for Binance.US Customer Support said in the reply. “This news is only for Binance.com users. We are completely separate entities from Binance.com.”
The action by Binance comes at a time when, after the implosion of crypto exchange FTX, regulatory scrutiny has prompted a crisis of confidence in other industry actors — and perhaps no other firm has been affected more so than FTX’s rival Binance.
In late January, Binance — the world’s largest crypto exchange — publicly admitted that management of its customer funds “has not always been perfect.”
At the same time, Reuters reported that Binance had served for years as one of the top thoroughfares for crypto exchange Bizlato, which recently got a federal citation.
A month earlier, in December, Binance’s efforts to restore public trust amid ongoing industry headwinds took a hit when a firm hired by the platform to produce a proof of reserve report endured criticism for the report, pulled the report from its website and said it was ceasing all future crypto accounting operations.
Instead of Binance being left as the clear industry leader after the fall of FTX, the broader crypto market has been playing nonstop defense.
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