> managing director, Pierre van Helden, said Cape Town-based FiveWest receives a "minimal yearly license fee" from Binance to facilitate crypto derivatives trading for Binance's South African users. "How Binance operates globally is unclear to us," van Helden said. He added that Zhao's company was "cooperative" on compliance and said FiveWest has regular meetings to ensure requirements are met.<p>I was wondering how an audit for a company moving billions of dollars ended up in the hands of a South African branch office of an accounting firm (Mazars).
Binance and Tether will not become insolvent, and that is precisely the issue. They have an essentially endless supply of laundered funds, criminal money, and international backing. It's essentially a financial weapon aimed at the West, and adversaries of the West will not let it fail. Major regulation is the only way that these beasts will be slain, but they have donned the cloak of "an exciting new fintech industry" and are lobbying like hell, so I'm not terribly optimistic.
What will happen when BTC, ETH are close to worthless but stable coins are the only things left? I guess it will prove once once for all the supremacy of the dollar.
I think these Bitcoin exchanges need to be regulated the same way banks are, or we are going to see a repeat of the early days of banking where banks would disappear overnight along with people's life savings.
I think it's amusing as hell how the founder of Binance had a spat with SBF and was partly responsible for hurrying along the collapse of FTX (though that dumpster fire was doomed anyhow), and is now reaping the whirlwind of his own backstabbing of another major crypto bro.<p>Note: I personally believe in the utility of crypto and think much of the hate for it on HN is downright idiotic and ignorant, but giant shenanigans like these are are a separate matter of natural human greed, fraud, lies and self destructive foolishness.<p><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/nov/11/binance-ftx-collapse-cryptocurrency-exchange-changpeng-zhao" rel="nofollow">https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/nov/11/binance-f...</a>
> <i>"We are a private company and are not required to publicize our corporate finances," he continued, comparing the exchange to privately-held firms such as U.S. candy maker Mars. In a statement, Mars said</i><p>Did Reuters solicit a response from Mars on that?
We got really lucky that the crypto industry is not regulated. If it were, the politicians would have gotten the opportunity to bail SBF out. Of course they wouldn’t want all the job losses!
> The Reuters analysis<p>The "investigative" part is public data that any of us can view. If there was something remarkable there, crypto bros would have found it without waiting for reuters to "review" things.<p>Obviously since binance is not based in the US or EU, its users don't expect the same level of transparency that banks have. If reuters wanted more transparency maybe it should ask some country to allow it to base itself there. But given that they have been effectively on the run for most of their existence, it's not strange that they are keeping their secrets to themselves. I think reuters is trying to be sensational but none of the news it reports are.