Binance Holdings Ltd. acquired a controlling stake in the troubled South Korean cryptocurrency exchange Gopax. Bloomberg reports this.
The purchase was financed through a joint investment project led by Binance, the Industry Recovery Initiative, which promised to allocate $1 billion. More detailed terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Binance’s Chief Business Officer Ibo Linga said that their company has taken a “significant” stake in Gopax, which in November 2022 halted withdrawals on several products.
Binance plans to invest in the exchange so that customers can withdraw their assets and earn interest on Gopax’s GoFi, the income-generating product.
The parent company of Gopax, Streami Inc., is among the 10 largest known creditors of the bankrupt crypto-lending platform Genesis Global. Genesis Global was a partner in the GoFi product offered by Gopax. Meanwhile, its parent company — Digital Currency Group — is the second-largest shareholder of the exchange.
Together with its stake in the South Korean platform, Binance is returning to the market in the country it left in 2021 due to low trading volumes.
In July 2022, media reported searches at Gopax’s headquarters as part of the Terra collapse investigation.