- The Philippine Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) banned trading in Binance due to a lack of license to operate within its jurisdiction.
- The regulator said the cryptocurrency exchange failed to comply with the country’s Securities Regulation Code.
Binance Ban in the Philippines
Trouble just seems to find its way toward Binance these days. After getting fined in the US with its former CEO, Changpeng “CZ” Zhao, possibly getting jail time, and its senior execs being entangled in another legal drama with Nigerian authorities, it was banned in the Philippines.
According to reports, the Philippine Securities and Exchange Commission requested the country’s National Telecommunications Commission (NTC) to block the public from accessing the website of Binance, its apps, and other related platforms. The regulator cited concerns over the unlicensed operations of the cryptocurrency exchange as its reason for the move.
“The SEC has identified the aforementioned platform and concluded that the public’s continued access to these websites/apps poses a threat to the security of the funds of investing Filipinos,” SEC Chair Emilio Aquino stated in a letter addressed to the NTC.
The SEC noted that Binance provided investment products, including leveraged trading and crypto savings accounts, without securing the licenses mandated by the nation’s Securities Regulation Code.
The ban followed the SEC’s warning in November last year about the risks posed by investing in Binance. By then, it was already looking for a way to prevent the public from using the platform. The government watchdog, however, ensured that it had given investors of the exchange enough time to pull out their funds and move their portfolio toward similar platforms authorized by Philippine laws.
Last month, the SEC also asked the NTC to block the trading platforms of OctaFX and MiTrade for similar reasons.
Crypto Adoption in the Philippines
The Philippines is one of the hotbeds of crypto adoption in the Southeast Asian region. Based on the latest study of Chainalysis, it ranks fifth in terms of volume of crypto transactions within the Central & Southern Asia and Oceania (CSAO) area in 2023. It displayed a major drop in this metric the year prior as it once ranked in the top three.
Meanwhile, Binance still dominates the global crypto exchange rankings in trading volume and scope. Currently, it has a 24-hour trading volume of $28.33 billion on the CoinMarketCap index with 20.54 million weekly visits in 1,542 markets worldwide. It hosts around 405 coins on its platform.