![]() ![]() The SEC also charged Binance and BAM Trading with operating unregistered securities exchanges, broker-dealers and clearing agencies, as well as the unregistered offering and sale of crypto assets including the Binance USD stablecoin, a digital token whose value is pegged to the American dollar. The regulator claims that Sigma also engaged in “manipulative trading” that artificially inflated trading volume on Binance.US. ![]() The SEC alleges that Zhao and Binance were able to commingle or divert customers assets “as they please” including to a Zhao-controlled entity called Sigma Chain. ![]() The SEC alleges that, while Zhao and Binance publicly claimed that Binance.US was created as a separate, independent trading platform for US investors, “Zhao and Binance secretly controlled the Binance.US platform’s operations behind the scenes”. The SEC said Binance and BAM operated the Binance.US platform, which had been created for US customers after the main Binance platform said in 2019 it was quitting the US market. The 13 civil charges have been placed against Zhao, Binance Holdings and two further Binance-linked entities, BAM Trading Services and BAM Management US Holdings. In its complaint filed on Monday at a federal district court in Washington, the SEC added: “Defendants have enriched themselves by billions of US dollars while placing investors’ assets at significant risk.” The complaint alleges that between June 2018 and July 2021, Binance earned at least $11.6bn (£9.3bn) in revenue, mostly from transaction fees.Īmong other charges, the SEC alleges that, while Zhao and Binance publicly claimed that US customers were restricted from transacting on, “Zhao and Binance in reality subverted their own controls to secretly allow high-value US customers to continue trading on the platform”. With a bulk of NFTs still tied to the Ethereum blockchain, a cryptocurrency known to exhaust considerable energy to mine, the overall process has sparked criticisms on its sustainability.Įxperts have noted that the environment will be the entity paying a heavy price.“We allege that Zhao and the Binance entities not only knew the rules of the road, but they also consciously chose to evade them and put their customers and investors at risk,” said Gurbir Grewal, director of the SEC’s enforcement division. NFT earnings of S$7.5 million in 10 days for S’pore-based influencer Irene Zhaoĭespite NFTs operating on a virtual platform, those who’ve purchased them are acquainted with the high gas fees, which is the fee buyers pay to execute the transaction on the blockchain. In a local scene, Singapore-based Chinese influencer and Instagram model Yuqing Irene Zhao listed her NFTs early this year, giving her earnings of S$7.5 million in 10 days. The owner of an NFT can then trade or sell the unit of data on digital markets. They also used information from Blockdata to measure the size of the NFT industry in each country.Īn NFT is unique digital data such as a drawing, Tweet, meme, music, or game character that can’t be replaced with something else. NFT Club used Google Keyword Planner and a range of common NFT-themed search queries to measure public interest. India came last in terms of interest, with just 254 searches per population. Meanwhile, the countries with people most interested in NFTs based on their search histories are Taiwan (9,629 NFT-related searches per 100,000 people), followed by Australia and Canada. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |