I thought it was worth clarifying exactly what has happened here, since neither the BBC nor the FT articles make it particularly clear.<p>The entity that the FCA has acted against is Binance Markets Limited (BML) which the parent Binance Group acquired earlier this year, in part because of its existing registration with the FCA which allowed it to carry out a limited range of regulated activities in the UK.<p>The FCA has now placed restrictions on BML which remove its ability to carry out those regulated activities -- however BML was not actually doing any business in the UK so the effect of this is limited.<p>The FCA also issued a consumer warning which, among other other things, reiterated that no entities in Binance Group are registered with the FCA and therefore cannot carry out regulated activity <i>in the UK</i>. Again, the impact of this is limited since the entity that you interact with when using the Binance.com website is not based in the UK, and the FCA does not have jurisdiction over it.<p>A possibly outcome is that Binance will be a bit more circumspect about offering derivatives trading to UK retail because they want to build a more substantial UK business in the future. We saw this with Bybit a while ago, where they do not allow UK retail to use their website (although they have an exception for sophisticated investors, who can self-certify as an <i>eligible counterparty</i> and continue to trade on Bybit). I wouldn't be surprised to see this.
> While the FCA does not regulate crypto-currencies, it does regulate cryptoassets. Firms must be authorised [...]to advertise or sell such products in the UK.<p>> This means that people in the UK are not allowed to use Binance's services to speculate, or bet<p>> However, they are still allowed to use the website to purchase and sell crypto-currencies, which is not regulated<p>So, all is well, just don't bet, speculate. Just buy and sell?
As much as I hate the 'FUD' label often given to anything negative in the crypto space, it is disappointing that even the BBC cannot use an honest title.
Binance is not 'banned' as they say- this is misleading. I am in the UK and still using it, it is only the derivatives products that have been banned.
They've also ceased operations in Canada's largest province: <a href="https://www.coindesk.com/binance-pulls-out-of-ontario-following-actions-against-other-crypto-exchanges" rel="nofollow">https://www.coindesk.com/binance-pulls-out-of-ontario-follow...</a>
In the UK there are many "contract for difference" exchanges, basically bucketshops. These products are outright unlawful in the US or at least are unlawful in retail-accessible forms.<p>My understanding is that this action is only about CFD products on binance, not normal buying/selling Bitcoin.<p>I find it weird that the UK allows so much access to these scam products in general, but I suppose it fits in with the general accessibility of gambling.
There is a morbid satisfaction watching the formal financial system tie itself in knots as it tries to come to terms with an even worse version of itself.<p>That large part of the financial system is glorified and useless gambling designed to extract rents by intermediaries is a matter of record [0]. Regulators have no problem with that, provided their rather arbitrary and self-servingly generous red lines are respected.<p>So what is happening now is that new information technology (faulty and immature at best) is being used by cunning operators to tap into that ingrained behavioral pattern outside their purview.<p>Yet what spoils the fun is the sense that (somewhere in a parallel universe) all the new digital gadgetry could somehow be used to make our economies more robust, more functional, more equitable, more sustainable,... more real and less financialised.<p>[0] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financialization" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financialization</a>
Good. A precursor to banning crypto itself, I hope. The government SHOULD have a monopoly on certain things, like lethal force (armies), and issuance of currency, because total chaos and anarchy would happen otherwise.