Binance Stops Share Token Sales, “Effective Immediately”

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Binance’s hugely popular stock exchange tokens, a relatively recent offering, are immediately liquidated. In an announcement released on Friday, the exchange announced that “as of now,” exchange tokens are not available for purchase on Binance.com. As of October 14, 2021 at 19:55 UTC, the exchange will no longer support stock tokens at all.

Existing stock token holders will have some time to adjust:

“Users who currently hold stock tokens can sell or hold them for the next 90 days. Users will no longer be able to sell or manually close their positions after October 14, 2021 at 7:55 p.m. (UTC). Thereafter, all stock token positions on Binance.com will close on 2021-10-15 13:30 (UTC). ”

Although not confirmed at the time of writing, Walter Bloomberg claimed in a tweet that:

If true, the development would confirm that increasing regulatory pressure on the world’s largest cryptocurrency platform continues to hit its operations hard.

At the end of April, it had already been reported that European and UK regulators were examining Binance’s stock token offering – which represent fractions of shares in companies such as Tesla and Coinbase – for possible non-compliance. securities laws. While initially not commenting on Binance in particular, Germany’s Federal Financial Supervisory Authority (BaFin) said at the time that:

“Fundamentally […] the following applies: If the tokens are transferable, can be traded on a crypto exchange and have economic rights such as dividends or cash settlements, they represent securities and are subject to the obligation to publish a prospectus.

BaFin was quick to explicitly mention Binance, noting its lack of published prospectuses for exchange tokens.

Related: Binance and FTX List Coinbase Stock Tokens Before Exchange Debut on Nasdaq

Spring and summer 2021 have been a difficult regulatory time for Binance, with several countries taking action against it or investigating its operations from various angles of compliance.

In the UK, the Financial Conduct Authority ordered the stock exchange to end all “regulated activity” in the country in June. In the same month, the Financial Services Agency of Japan accused Binance of operating in the country without proper registration, and new measures against crypto exchanges in the Canadian province of Ontario prompted the exchange to cease all its operations. operations there.