One attraction of Binance, as the company grew from its 2017 founding into the biggest cryptocurrency exchange in the world, was the firm's freewheeling flouting of rules.
As it amassed well over 100 million crypto-trading users globally, it openly told the United States government that, as an offshore operation, it didn't have to comply with the country's financial regulations and money-laundering laws.
Late last month, those years of brushing off US regulators caught up with the company in the form of one the most punitive money-laundering criminal settlements in the history of the US Justice Department.
The crackdown doesn't just mean a chastened Binance will have to change its practices going forward.
It means that when the company is sentenced in a matter of months, it will be forced to open its past books to regulators, too.
What was once a haven for anarchic crypto commerce is about to be transformed into the opposite: perhaps the most fed-friendly business in the cryptocurrency industry, retroactively offering more than a half-decade of users' transaction records to US regulators and law enforcement.
When the Department of Justice announced on November 21 that Binance's executives had agreed to plead guilty to criminal money-laundering charges, much of the attention on that settlement focused on founder Changpeng Zhao giving up his CEO role and on the company's record-breaking $4.3 billion fine.
Binance's settlement agreements with the DOJ and the US Treasury Department also stipulate a strict new regime of data-sharing with law enforcement and regulators.
Binance has also agreed to scour all of its transactions from 2018 to 2022 and file suspicious activity reports for anything it deems a potential violation of US law from that five-year period.
Those SARs are collected by FinCEN, the Treasury Department's financial crimes division, but then made available to law enforcement agencies from the FBI to IRS Criminal Investigations to local police.
This Cyber News was published on www.wired.com. Publication date: Wed, 06 Dec 2023 19:43:05 +0000