Sad times for Binance's UK customers: they can no longer take out new subscriptions for Binance Earn products including Simple Earn (both locked and flexible staking), DeFi Staking, ETH 2.0 Staking, BNB Vault, and Liquidity Farming. Unfortunately I'm one of those customers.

I've been a regular user of some of these products for a couple of years now, in particular locked and flexible staking as well as BNB Vault and ETH staking. But last week I tried to stake some SAND on the platform only to be presented with the following message:

"Dear user, as per our Terms of Use and compliance with local regulations, these features are not available in your region"

How strange! I hadn't received any sort of notification about it. So I joined the Binance Discord server and found there were lots of other disgruntled Binance users here in the UK with the same problem. For example:

This user, Azolified, is wrong about one thing: his staked funds are not 'dead crypto'. Previously staked crypto is still earning rewards, at least for the time being - I've taken a couple of snapshots on my own account to prove this. It just isn't possible to take out any new subscriptions.

Then just yesterday I did finally receive some communication from Binance - in the form of an email. As well as confirming the situation regarding new subscriptions, it stated that existing subscriptions will be "returned to your spots wallet, together with any accrued rewards". Here are the time frames:

All this puts me in a bit of a conundrum. With Binance being the largest crypto exchange in the world in terms of trading volume, it has been something of a safe harbour in terms of my CeFi (Centralised Finance) activity. I'll obviously be withdrawing my funds from Binance as the risk/reward ratio will no longer justify keeping them there.

But I don't really want to move too many funds over to a smaller exchange, especially given that I was slightly burned by both Celsius and FTX. And with 20% of my portfolio currently tied up in Binance staking, this is something I need to get right.

Instead I'm going to lean towards DeFi (Decentralised Finance) as well as self-custody. In the immediate term I'll be making more use of Trust, a non-custodial wallet that also offers staking on several coins and tokens. Here are the current options:

Ironically enough, Trust is Binance's official non-custodial wallet - and when staking, you can choose Binance as a validator (as one among many other options). So it may be that I take my crypto off Binance's centralised exchange only to redeploy it elsewhere within the wider Binance ecosystem.

Have you been affected by Binance's decision to withdraw Earn products from UK customers? If so, what are you planning to do with your funds? I'd love to hear!