CFTC, Department of Justice file charges against BitMEX

[MCobian]

Here our mentally tested by bad news regarding the charges against Bitmex, making all crypto prices start falling.
Especially the altcoins price fell quite a bit by 3% -10%, luckily I always use the stop-loss feature. So the losses that
I experienced were not too big. So for the time being my crypto assets are kept in USDT first, I'll be monitoring the
market for the next few days. If the price drops again I will start to enter the market again.

[bitcoinst]

Update3:
according to Glassnode, 23,200 BTC were withdrawn from Bitmex last night, which is approximately 13% of their storage capacity.

This is the largest amount of BTC withdrawn from Bitmex in an hour.

Update4:
approximately 6,000 BTC have been withdrawn from Bitmex in the last hour.

In total, about 32,000 BTC were withdrawn from the exchange per day, which is about 19% of all volumes.

[stompix]

In total, about 32,000 BTC were withdrawn from the exchange per day, which is about 19% of all volumes.

Weird that the volume reported by Bitmex has spiked, yesterday was at 165,430 BTC now it's 224.318 BTC, would that all be people liquidating?
Either way, I don't know why somebody would be confident enough to keep funds there, even if they reside outside the US.

Is there any possibility for the American Government to withhold funds?

I doubt it, it's more a case of Bitmex not enforcing AML rules, they haven't accused them of being involved in any money laundering or pointed out cases like that with known customers using them for this purpose, so probably they will not move to seize the servers are accounts, and besides they would have already done it.

[bitcoinst]

Another 10.6k BTC was withdrawn during BitMEX's regular withdrawal processing today (13:00 UTC)

That's 25% of BitMEX's Bitcoin (48.4k of 193k) that have been withdrawn since yesterday's CFTC charges were announced



https://twitter.com/coinmetrics/status/1312030319978196992?s=20

[figmentofmyass]

Wait isn't this the same things that the big banks just got caught doing for foreign nationals coming into the united states?

Just taking a stab in the dark here but I could probably guess the number of HSBC bankers knowingly ignoring where funds came from being arrested still stands at 0?

true, but HSBC also has all the rubber stamp banking licenses they need, and they collect KYC for transactions of remotely significant size. they at least pretend to comply with the law. bitmex on the other hand flouted the law pretty openly.

i was always wondering if the feds would test the theory that geo-blocking alone (no KYC) is insufficient to block USA customers. now i've got my answer.

[jackg]

true, but HSBC also has all the rubber stamp banking licenses they need, and they collect KYC for transactions of remotely significant size. they at least pretend to comply with the law. bitmex on the other hand flouted the law pretty openly.

i was always wondering if the feds would test the theory that geo-blocking alone (no KYC) is insufficient to block USA customers. now i've got my answer.

I think binance is hosted from Singapore, I'm not sure about bybit but it'll be interesting to see if anything can happen to those two offering the same thing....

[figmentofmyass]

true, but HSBC also has all the rubber stamp banking licenses they need, and they collect KYC for transactions of remotely significant size. they at least pretend to comply with the law. bitmex on the other hand flouted the law pretty openly.

i was always wondering if the feds would test the theory that geo-blocking alone (no KYC) is insufficient to block USA customers. now i've got my answer.

I think binance is hosted from Singapore, I'm not sure about bybit but it'll be interesting to see if anything can happen to those two offering the same thing....

binance at least has some AML procedures in place, and they only allow 2 BTC worth of daily withdrawals from unverified accounts. bitmex had no such controls in place and had also been offering its services for years longer than binance. i've also heard binance is fairly responsive to requests from the USA government, which could play in their favor. these could all be reasons why bitmex is getting targeted and not binance.

bybit is too small and young to be on the radar IMO, but i do think going after bitmex like this is a "warning shot" from the feds, intended to scare non-compliant exchanges into blocking USA customers and mandating KYC.