What’s Happening with Binance? Crash or Rumors?

The Wall Street Journal published an article criticizing the reserves of the Binance exchange. Former Financial Accounting Standards Board member and investment manager Hal Schroeder said that the company did not provide any information about the quality of its accounting and corporate structure.

Analysts were also confused by the number of reserves in the BUSD stablecoin, which the exchange itself issues. Mazars’ audit report says that the amount of assets controlled by the exchange is 597,602.29 BTC; the balance of net liabilities to users is 575,742.42 BTC; the balance of fixed assets is 582,485.93 BTC.

WSJ consultants noted that there is a 3% deficit in the third position. However, Binance spokeswoman Jessica Jung explained that the difference consisted of loans made to customers in bitcoin against collateral in other assets. She argues that this type of loan is over-collateralized.

Against the backdrop of all these events, Nansen recorded a tremendous outflow of funds from the exchange. Within 24 hours, $1.8 billion was withdrawn from the exchange. Onchain data showed that the Jump Trading fund and market maker Wintermute were transferring significant amounts from Binance in the last week. Jump Trading alone withdrew about $146 million.

Binance then suspended USDC withdrawals via Tron, BNB Chain, and Ethereum. Changpeng Zhao, the head of the company, said that due to increased demand and conversion without a 1:1 margin, they needed to wait for the banks to open. The USDC withdrawal continues to work on the rest of the networks.

For his part, Tron founder Justin Sun attached a hash of the transaction and said he had deposited $100 million on the Binance exchange as support.

Yesterday, Reuters published an article saying that the U.S. Attorney’s Office was ready to launch a case against Binance. Today, Zhao announced that this was not the first time he encountered such aggressive FUD, and they were just keeping working.