Bitcoin Forum

Binance banned in Malaysia, given 14 days notice to shut down operations

Malaysia is the latest regulatory theater to come after Binance as authorities in the country have accused the exchange giant of continuing to operate in the country illegally.

According to an announcement released on Friday, the Securities Commission (SC) Malaysia has served a public reprimand against Binance, calling for the exchange and all of its entities to cease operations in the country.

The SC stated that Binance continued to operate in Malaysia despite previous warnings. Indeed, back in July 2020, Cointelegraph reported that Binance was not permitted to operate in Malaysia.

At the time, the SC published an "Investor Alert List" containing several digital asset exchanges offering services in the country without due authorization from Malaysian regulators.

Binance has 14 business days from Tuesday to comply with the order that includes disabling its website and mobile apps, as well as discontinuing any media campaign for its services in the country.

The announcement also mandated that Binance's CEO, Changpeng Zhao, ensures full compliance with the order. Malaysia's securities regulator also urged citizens to desist from trading with crypto exchanges operating in the country illegally.

Read more https://cointelegraph.com/news/binance-banned-in-malaysia-given-14-days-notice-to-shut-down-operations

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What did Binance do to endure all this regulatory pressure??

This is alarming, I think in the past month it was Thailand that did this and now Malaysia? Binance should start doing the work of making sure they are operating on legal ground in a lot of countries that are using their services. Are there any way for the government of Malaysia to turn over their decision on this one and make those 14 days a way to make them legal instead of terminating their operations.

Don't worry they are just shutting down temporarily in order to keep up with compliance and adjust to the rules of every major jurisdiction they're into. Haven't you heard they're gonna install HQs in some major regions? Again, don't worry, Binance's only bow before the regulators after years of piracy.

It's not what Binance did, but what they failed to do, when making quite overt approaches in all these countries (mass marketing campaigns, even physical events and "educational" things), oh yeah, they did quite a lot of stuff on the ground even in Africa (where they actually pulled out finally, before all these dominos started falling). Malaysia's got a number of recognized exchanges (non-orderbook ones like Luno), and even some licensing. But Binance's other business -- those IEO platform fails and trading competitions, etc, those have lost people money and you know how it goes.

Angry investor loses money in ICO/IEO scams or trading contests. Makes angry call to SC. SC kneejerks. They'll welcome Binance back with open arms when licensing deals are in place.

Either they will comply with regulation, or just cooperate with Malaysia's local exchange indirectly. Just like how they did it with Tokocrypto in Indonesia, so they don't really have to open a branch there. Not surprising tbh, but the days when non-KYC users can enjoy 2BTC limit and other stuff might end pretty soon.

Not much I guess. It seems they're not doing much and doesn't care much as well. All we usually hear from them as a response to this kind of regulatory issue which is coming out from various countries are simply generic statements. Well, they're probably being true to what they said that they do not normally release public statements regarding such issues and that they're actually working it out silently. However, it seems to me that getting banned from operating in a handful of countries is a result of failing to take the necessary steps at the right time, or simply not taking things quite seriously.

But they had all the time to legitimatize their operations since the warnings were handed out about a year ago. I don't get  why they didn't act and instead choose to continue making profits.

Binance grew up at a sporadic speed but one thing that I sense could lead to their failure as the leading crypto exchange is rushing to introduce new products and listing shitcoins in their platform in a blink of an eye without prior considerations and in depth research because they want to get lots of traffic and profits. All the Leveraged tokens, IEOS, stock tokens, yield farms and staking pool have made some newbies lose a lot of money and with that, the regulators are bound to start poking their noses into your business.

They have a habit of ignoring the warnings until they're left with no other choice but to comply.

Based on the first part of the following "tweet (https://twitter.com/cz_binance/status/1421078227846455297)" by CZ, I have a feeling there might be internal issues in regards to how they should be handling such stuff.

No doubt this is because they are one of the biggest exchanges, there's nothing they can do is to face the significant scrutiny investigations by most regulators worldwide and they need just to cooperate with those regulators to comply with regulatory complaince for the sake of their whole business will close just because of that if they will not follow as a regulator says.  It seems there are too many implementations of new regulations now with Binance right at this moment.

However, I read that not only Malaysia doing this to Binance before, also these countries warned on Binance legal registration such as Poland, Japan, and Italy.  This scenario will also happen to these countries.

Anyway, thank you for the head up and luckily, I do not belong to that country and still enjoying in trading using Binance.

I thought they were, starting with the creation of the US-specific site.  After that, I figured Binance was trying to do things by the book.

Having said that, I have no idea what laws are on the books as far as allowing a business like Binance to operate in Malaysia and I wonder if there's anything they can do that would allow them to keep servicing Malaysian customers, i.e., if they have a chance to correct any errors on their part or if the government is just telling them they can't operate in the country.  I'm hoping it's the former, because if Binance is banned in yet another country, well, it's an ominous sign to say the least.

OK, if that's the case it's better than a scenario where they're completely banned from a country no matter what they do.  It's also not the best move on Binance's part if they want any sort of goodwill with the countries in which they operate.