Binance.US halts trading for dozens of USDT, BTC, BUSD pairs amid SEC lawsuit
Binance’s arm in the United States suspended its OTC trading platform and reduced the number of supported convert trading pairs.
Updated (June 8 at 12:44 AM UTC): This article has been updated to include comments from a Tether spokesperson.
Binance.US removed trading services for several crypto tokens on June 7. The move follows a lawsuit filed earlier this week by the United States Securities and Exchange Commission against Binance entities and thei leadership.
“After careful consideration, Binance.US will remove selected Advanced Trading pairs on June 8, 2023 at 9 a.m. PDT / 12 p.m. EDT. We have also decided to streamline our Buy, Sell & Convert offering and have paused our OTC Trading Portal,” reads an announcement.
The pause affects over 90 trading pairs of the stablecoin Tether (USDT), eight Bitcoin (BTC) pairs and two Binance USD (BUSD) pairs. According to Binance.US, deposits and withdrawals remain available.
In a statement sent to Cointelegraph, a spokesperson for Tether suggested the decision could be a preemptive move for non-USDT tokens listed on the exchange that could be considered securities by the SEC.
Binance.US also reduced the number of supported convert trading pairs. Currently, buy, sell and convert options remain available for only USDT, USD Coin (USDC), BNB (BNB), Ether (ETH), BTC, Fetch.ai (FET), Cosmos (ATOM), Aptos (APT), Polygon (MATIC), Litecoin (LTC), Dogecoin (DOGE), Shiba Inu (SHIB), Fantom (FTM), ApeCoin (APE), Solana (SOL), Chainlink (LINK), Cardano (ADA), Polkadot (DOT), Gala (GALA) and Avalanche (AVAX).
Conversion for USD will remain available, said the exchange. However, the maximum trade amount for buy, sell and convert options has been updated to $10,000. Additionally, Binance.US shut down its over-the-counter (OTC) trading platform without informing when it will resume operations.
On June 5, the SEC filed a lawsuit against Binance for allegedly offering unregistered securities. The U.S. regulator pressed 13 charges against the exchange, including unregistered offers and sales of the BNB and BUSD tokens, the Simple Earn and BNB Vault products, and its staking program.
In addition, the SEC alleges in the suit that Binance failed to register its Binance.com platform as an exchange or a broker-dealer clearing agency. Only a day after filing the Binance suit, the commission also went after Coinbase on similar grounds, alleging that popular cryptocurrencies offered by the exchange, such as SOL, MATIC and The Sandbox (SAND), qualify as securities.
Magazine: Ordinals turned Bitcoin into a worse version of Ethereum — Can we fix it?
