Imagining A Cryptocurrency Landscape Without Binance

Fresh off its legal case against Coinbase
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, the Securities and Exchange Commission went after Binance with a vengeance. The company’s attorneys said it would grind trading at its U.S. subsidiary to a halt and force lenders to stop funding them, which has not really transpired at this time. However, the situation seems pretty dire. The SEC filed 13 charges against Binance, founded in Shanghai in 2017 and now headquartered in the Cayman Islands with servers worldwide.

At the core of the SEC fight is the charge that the Forbes billionaire and Binance founder, Changpeng Zhao (aka “CZ”), has subverted the company’s own compliance rules by secretly allowing U.S. customers to trade on the Binance.com platform. Unlike Coinbase, Binance is not open to American retail investors here. Domestic users need to hop on Binance.US, which the SEC says is really Binance, minus the dot-U.S. extension.