The cryptocurrency exchange Binance has rejected Reuters’ report asserting that user funds were commingled with corporate revenues in 2020 and 2021, in материале Reuters.
Let me explain just how desperate a journalist @Reuters is to publish a negative story. The whole base of their story this morning, is that when users purchased BUSD (Paxos) from Binance, they were taken to a transaction page that had the term “deposit” on it. Users were making a…
— Patrick Hillmann (@PRHillmann) May 23, 2023
Patrik Hillmann, the company’s chief strategy officer, said that Reuters journalists were desperate to publish a “bad story” that turned out “weak”.
“Then they crammed 1,000 words of conspiracy theories (which, as we explained, were false) with zero evidence, besides an ‘ex-insider’ […]. We were very public about the company’s past regulatory shortcomings,” the senior executive wrote.
In a subsequent tweet, Hillmann wrote that Binance keeps “user and corporate funds in completely different ledgers”.
“The agency studied a bank record indicating that on February 10, 2021, Binance mixed $20 million from the corporate account with $15 million from the account that held customer funds,” the article states.
A Binance spokesperson, Brad Jaffe, told Reuters that the Silvergate Bank accounts were not used to accept deposits from traders — only “to facilitate users’ purchases of cryptocurrencies”.
“There has never been any commingling, because these are 100% corporate funds,” he noted.
In March 2023, the CFTC filed a lawsuit against the cryptocurrency exchange Binance and its CEO Changpeng Zhao. The agency contends that the platform traded derivatives in violation of rules, operating without the proper registration.
Within roughly a week after the CFTC’s allegations, Binance’s share of the spot market fell from 70% to 54%.
In February, NYDFS began an investigation into Paxos—the issuer of the BUSD stablecoin linked to Binance.