Binance announced it would suspend fund deposits and withdrawals from its accounts in USD. However, Binance.US customers won’t be affected.
Starting from February 8, Binance temporarily suspends all bank transfers in U.S. dollars. This was announced by representatives on Twitter.
Binance says that the suspension will affect only a small percentage of users, and “all other methods of buying and selling crypto remain unaffected,” Binance.US users included. According to Changpeng Zhao, CEO of Binance, USD bank transfers are leveraged by only 0.01% of the exchange’s monthly active users.
But neither CZ nor other spokespeople officially explained the decision. Binance also didn’t provide any timeline for restoring its functionality, saying only that it would restart the service “as soon as possible.” According to Twitter user tier10k, the suspension will probably last “a couple of weeks.” Citing someone familiar with the matter, tier10k claims that the exchange’s functionality will only be restored once a “new banking partner” for Binance is established.
This is about the crypto exchange’s recent challenges with bank transfers in the United States. In late January 2023, Binance’s SWIFT transfer partner Signature Bank announced restrictions on transfer processing for Binance users from February 1. The bank refused to transfer payments of less than $100,000. However, Binance assured users that this wouldn’t affect transactions with USD. Later, the exchange’s blog posted a list of 144 countries where SWIFT dollar transfers of any volume would be suspended.
UPD: Binance commented for CP Media on the suspension of USD transactions:
“We are suspending bank transfers in U.S. dollars due to updates on our services. Affected customers have been notified directly. We regret the inconvenience and are working hard to restore our service.
Meanwhile, all other methods of buying and selling crypto remain valid, including bank transfers with other fiat currencies supported by Binance (including EUR), buying and selling crypto using credit and debit cards, Google Pay and Apple Pay services, or via our trading platform Binance P2P.”
After Binance announced the problems with its banking partners, users withdrew more than $172 million from the crypto exchange’s accounts. Most of these funds were withdrawn in USDT and USDC stablecoins. This was reported by CNBC, citing Arkham Intelligence.
Since February 6, Trust Wallet, which is developed and supported by Binance, limited withdrawals of USDT on the Tron network for unknown reasons. This was reported by several users at once. As of 10:00 (GMT+2), February 7, 2023, TRC-20 withdrawals are still unavailable.
UPD: The Trust Wallet team released an update for an Android version of the crypto wallet, fixing a TRC-20 standard bug. This was announced by Justin Sun, Founder of Tron. The update for iOS devices is scheduled to be released on February 8.
Though in 2022, Binance was affected by FUD and lost liquidity, the number of registered users on the site reached 128 million by the end of the year.
