In the last few weeks, the world's largest exchange Binance has honestly not caught a break from countries across the globe. It seems like just about every time you see the word Binance pop up some regulator somewhere has hit them with a new regulation or worse they have pulled products. This is not something I feel that people should find surprising though as Binance really built its brand on pushing the limits.
Something I do not think a ton of people know is that Binance was initially founded and based in China before the country forced them out in 2017 and relocated its servers outside of China at that time. Binance was banned from operating in the US-based on the regulatory ground in 2019 and this leads to the creation of Binance.us the United States-based arm. This arm while under the Binance umbrella does not have near the volume that Binance does so using it is rather negative as prices are not typically the best.
The first "big" international news of Binance running into regulation issues dealt with Malta and came out in 2020. During this time media companies kept reporting Binance as a Malta-based cooperation. This was not the case as Malta had not issued Binance any sort of regulation permits because they did not have any laws about regulating crypto.
After this, it seemed that Binance was laying low and was not running into regulation issues but with a snap of a finger that seems to have changed. Thus far in 2021 three important developed nations have issued warnings to Binance for what they are doing. It has come out the United States Department of Justice and the Internal Revenue Services (IRS) have launched investigations into Binance and its activities with an emphasis on money laundering and tax evasion. In Germany, the Federal Financial Supervisory Authority warned the company about its security-tracking digital tokens and how they ran a risk of fines due to them.
Lastly and probably the biggest run-in was with the regulators in the United Kingdom. The United Kingdom's Finacial Conduct Authority informed all firms dealing with crypto that they needed to register to comply with anti-money laundering laws in the country. Binance however did not do so and this has lead to a huge slew of issues for UK customers. While UK customers can still access their accounts and trade their crypto due to being registered in the Caymen Islands Binance is not able to advertise, set up a UK based exchange, and most importantly was required to show the FCA that they had stored records of all UK customers that could be turned over whenever the FCA asked.
For any company, this is a ton of bad news and as this stuff has been trickling out new blockchains have launched and/or gained popularity that has super low transaction fees compared to Ethereum. Binance's Binance Smart Chain was a huge boom for the company as BSC is a centralized network that offered super low transaction fees but now faces stiff competition from networks like Polygon (MATIC).
The newest bright spot for Binance has been its NFT marketplace and they have scored a new HUGE NFT
