Binance sees $956 million in outflows after Zhao steps down to settle US probe
investing.comBy Lisa Pauline Mattackal, Chris Prentice and Jonathan Stempel
(Reuters) -Investors pulled about $956 million from crypto exchange Binance over the past 24 hours after its chief, Changpeng Zhao, stepped down and faced prison time after pleading guilty to settle a years-long U.S. illicit finance probe.
The deal, in which Binance will pay $4.3 billion to U.S. authorities, raises questions over the future of the world's largest crypto exchange and marks another blow for an industry beset by scandals. Zhao has been replaced by Richard Teng, a senior Binance executive who joined in 2021, the company said.
Data from crypto analytics platform Nansen, which does not include bitcoin flows, signaled some investors had been rattled by the news and pulled assets from the exchange. Still, well over $65 billion of assets remain on the platform, according to Nansen.
«Binance has seen significant exchange outflows since the announcement, but relative to their total holdings, it's quite small,» Nansen analysts said.
By comparison, investors pulled around $1.43 billion from the crypto exchange and its U.S. affiliate in June after the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission sued the companies.
Among its alleged crimes, Binance failed to report more than 100,000 suspicious transactions including with organizations the U.S. described as terrorist groups — Hamas, al Qaeda and the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, authorities said.
The exchange also never reported transactions with websites devoted to selling child sexual abuse materials and was one of the largest recipients of ransomware proceeds, they said.
Binance did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but said on Tuesday it had worked hard to fix its problems and had
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