(Bloomberg) — Singapore’s financial regulator said it would follow up as required with the local unit of Binance Holdings Ltd. after its parent company came under scrutiny from authorities around the world.
Binance Asia Services Pte. has a grace period during which it can operate in the city-state while the Monetary Authority of Singapore reviews its application for a license to provide digital payment token services, the regulator said Thursday. A number of other companies are undergoing a similar assessment and can continue their operations in the meantime, a MAS representative said in response to queries from Bloomberg.

“We are aware of the actions taken by other regulatory authorities against Binance and will follow up as appropriate,” the authority said.
The cryptocurrency sector is in the midst of a regulatory crackdown as authorities from China to the U.S. grow concerned about its potential to facilitate money laundering and fraud. In one of the most significant actions to date, an affiliate of Binance Holdings — the top global crypto bourse — was banned from doing regulated business in the U.K.
The parent company is being probed by several agencies in the US, Bloomberg News has reported, and Japan’s Financial Services Agency warned that it offered crypto services without registration.
Binance is seeking a license that would legitimise its operations in Singapore, along with crypto firms including New York-based Gemini Trust Co. LLC and Hong Kong-based Crypto.com.

Binance Asia Services is a separate legal entity and does not offer any products or services via the Binance.com website or Binance Markets Ltd., the company said by email. The Singapore entity is backed by Vertex Ventures Holdings, and focuses on growing the local blockchain ecosystem and servicing users here, it said.
“It is important to note that we take a collaborative approach in working with regulators and we take our compliance obligations very seriously,” Binance said in the email. “We are actively keeping abreast of changing policies, rules and laws in this new space.”
The MAS said it is applying “robust standards” in assessing applications, and considers a number of factors such as the applicant’s ability to implement strong measures against illicit flows, as well as fitness and propriety of shareholders and key appointment holders. information

Customers of Binance, one of the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchanges, are confronting that question after their accounts were suddenly cut off from one of the UK’s main payments systems.
Days after the Financial Conduct Authority ordered Binance to halt all regulated activities  Britain, the digital asset company Stopped allowing its customers to withdraw pounds via Faster Payments, a service used by high street banks. Bank card transfers in pounds were also halted.
Binance insists that the FCA ban does not affect its business and some of the links have been reinstated. Customers could still transfer their holdings to other platforms. But the sudden halt highlights a key issue for the freewheeling world of cryptocurrencies. With the notable exception of El Salvador no country uses bitcoin as legal tender — and even Elon Musk has backed off plans to accept it as payment for Teslas. Instead, crypto holders must find ways to convert it into fiat currencies. others info

Apollo Capital is bullish on Pendle Finance, an interesting new defi (decentralised finance) platform that launched its mainnet just a week and a half ago.
They had good fundraiser, and some big backers, and reasonably secure – they’ve had three different audits, and it provides really good farming opportunities at the moment,” Matthew Harcourt says.
For those new to defi, “farming” here doesn’t involve crops or cattle but “yield”, the process of earning a return on one’s crypto by locking it up in smart contracts in exchange for big rewards. (The locked-up crypto is lent to others or used in liquidity pools for trading purposes).
Defi is “composable,” meaning different protocols can interact with each other in a permissionless way. People in the space have talked about the various defi platforms as “Lego building blocks” or “money Legos,” which are coming together synergistically. information

The UK’s financial watchdog has ordered Binance to stop all regulated activities in Britain and imposed stringent requirements in a stinging rebuke of one of the world’s biggest cryptocurrency exchanges.

The intervention by the Financial Conduct Authority in recent days is one of the most significant moves any global regulator has made against Binance, a sprawling digital asset firm with subsidiaries around the world. The exchange has until Wednesday evening to confirm it has complied with the watchdog’s demands, and removed its advertising.

The intervention is a sign of how regulators are cracking down on the cryptocurrency industry over concerns relating to its potential role in illicit activities such as money laundering and fraud, and over often weak consumer protection.
The FCA also this weekend issued a consumer warning against both the Cayman Islands-registered Binance holdings company and Binance Markets Limited, a London-based affiliate that is controlled by chief executive Changpeng Zhao and is overseen by the UK regulator.

“Binance Markets Limited is not permitted to undertake any regulated activity in the UK,” the FCA said, adding, “no other entity in the Binance Group holds any form of UK authorisation, registration or licence to conduct regulated activity in the UK.”

The group did not immediately respond to a FT request for comment, but has previously said it “takes its compliance obligations very seriously and is committed to following local regulator requirements wherever we operate”. information More

The $40 billion DeFi market is fueled exclusively by the very best decentralized exchanges, a type of trading platform that we respect as a guardian of blockchain technology and its decentralized spirit. If you are in need of quality DEXs and an explanation of why they are important, you have found the right guide.

How can we call ourselves true cryptocurrency supporters if we buy coins and tokens through centralized exchanges? The ethos of decentralization is vital for crypto’s survival, and thankfully enough, the popularity of decentralized exchanges (DEXs) reveals that there is still hope for preserving traditional blockchain values.

Our new type of trading platform helped with reviving crypto by bringing entirely new features and methods of making money. It sparked the yield farming craze, implemented voting powers through governance models, and even led to crypto loans.

DEXs successfully compete with CEXs and even major companies like Coinbase have trouble contesting decentralized liquidity protocols like Uniswap. We trade in an environment entirely different compared to the last bull run. On that account, how can anyone interact with cryptocurrencies without knowing about the best decentralized exchanges?

We will give you a helping hand in discovering these great platforms, but before we do that it would be wise to first learn more about the importance of decentralized exchanges. information

Price volatility is the norm in crypto markets, but last week saw the price of decentralized finance (DeFi) project Iron Finance’s Titanium (TITAN) token plummeting — from US$64.19 to zero — in a single day. 

Even American billionaire investor Mark Cuban — who had endorsed TITAN in a blog post just days before — was not left unscathed by the token’s crash, taking to Twitter to say “I got hit like everyone else. Crazy part is I got out, thought they were increasing their [total value locked] enough. Than Bam.”

“BTW I wasn’t a backer. I was a liquidity provider. I made money in one [liquidity pool] and then lost money during the bank run on the a second,” said Cuban in another tweet replying to American economist Steve Hanke. Earlier, Hanke had tweeted: “#DeFi tokens are the latest cryptos to take a nose dive. Like @mcuban-backed #TITAN, more and more cryptos will bite the dust and reveal that they are nothing more than highly speculative assets with fundamental values of ZERO!”

Before Titan token’s dramatic collapse, Iron was seeing exponential growth in total value locked, rising from US$30 million on May 20 to US$1.2 billion on June 12.

How did Iron Finance investors, even a supposedly savvy one like Cuban “get rekted,” in crypto parlance — suffer a heavy financial loss caused by a wrong trade or investment.
information

Traditional finance and crypto are often viewed as competing ecosystems, which should not be the case. Crypto is an advanced version of today’s markets, with the main distinguishing factor being a decentralized architecture.

Legacy finance ecosystems are centralized in nature, which means that they are controlled from a central point. For instance, central banks and the federal reserve ensure that the money supply is kept in check.

This is not the case for crypto, where operations are pre-coded on decentralized smart contracts – no central parties involved. information

Bitcoin (BTC) millionaires have accelerated the movement of the world’s largest cryptocurrency to around the important price level of $40,000. Transfers are mainly focused on the movement of BTC from leading cryptocurrency exchanges to digital wallets.
Whale Alert, a well-known blockchain tracking and analytics platform, highlighted a transaction involving the transfer of 5,001 Bitcoin yesterday from the US-based cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase to a digital wallet. The total value of the transfer stands at around $202 million. information