On Wednesday, the American arm of Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange, restored access to USD services, as the regulatory climate for cryptocurrency grows more favorable. The move will allow customers to withdraw U.S. dollars without any fees, purchase digital assets via bank transfers, and trade USD pairs such as BTC-USD again.
The company initially suspended USD deposits and delisted USD pairs in June 2023, following mounting concerns over regulatory compliance.
In 2023, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filed a lawsuit against the company, which it recently announced it was temporarily pausing. Binance previously said the regulator took a harsh regulatory cudgel to the company's business, creating a legal black cloud around the company that made it increasingly more challenging to access banking services. “The SEC has taken to using extremely aggressive and intimidating tactics in its pursuit of an ideological campaign against the American digital asset industry,” the company said at the time.
“We were forced to begin operating as a crypto-only platform,” Binance.US’s Interim CEO Norman Reed said. “We have been looking forward to the day that we would be able to offer full USD services again.”
Elizabeth Warren, a prominent critic of the crypto industry, recently echoed the crypto industry in decrying the alleged widespread debanking of firms by major U.S. banks. “There are times when a bank has a legitimate reason, and a legal obligation, to freeze or close a bank account,” Warren wrote in a request to President Trump this year to investigate the practice. “But banks may be implementing these legal obligations in a sloppy and overbroad manner.”
Although Trump has also castigated banks for allegedly debanking key constituencies, his administration’s recent move to gut the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau — the main body protecting Americans from bad actors in the banking sector — has largely stripped its enforcement capabilities, potentially making it easier for banks to continue the practice.