They're one of Team Tether's top partners in crime.
How on earth can you believe their volume numbers haha.
That's blatantly false. Many have been caught trying to circumvent via VPN or similar, it's just impossible to catch quite everyone no matter how hard you try.
>which country they're domiciled.
Malta?
https://www.coindesk.com/binance-doesnt-have-a-headquarters-...
In fact "Malta ... question mark?" is about as much information as we have.
And the KYC evade is just based on opening more accounts before you reach their threshold. Because rather than operating like a real business, requiring everyone to provide KYC during onboarding, they just look the other way.
Binance has never been in Malta, in fact they are not located anywhere. I would be very cautious in dealing with them because to me that kind of approach to regulation doesnt sound healthy.
Oh my god lol.
> [Binance established their headquarters in Malta] soon after the Maltese government passed laws that provided a regulatory framework for businesses operating in the Cryptocurrency and Blockchain industry. The regulation officially passed into a law on July 4th 2018. Malta remains the only country in the world to officially pass such laws.
The Coindesk article from 2020 states:
> Until February [of 2020], Binance was considered to be based in Malta. That changed when the island European nation announced that, no, Binance is not under its jurisdiction. Since then Binance has not said just where, exactly, it is now headquartered.
And quotes CZ:
> “Well, I think what this is is the beauty of the blockchain, right, so you don’t have to … like where’s the Bitcoin office, because Bitcoin doesn’t have an office.” [1]
The Wikipedia article is stale, and incorrect on the basis of the subsequent statements from executives involved.
The beauty of blockchain indeed.
[1] https://www.coindesk.com/binance-doesnt-have-a-headquarters-...
They might be inflating their numbers but they are definitively huge. Everyone I know who is involved in Crypto is using them.
Remember that ETF that was trying to list a few years ago said 95% of all volume in the crypto space was fake. [1] Now, at the time, they included Binance as a legitimate exchange but you know nobody's looking and they can do literally whatever they want.
That designation is especially suspect as:
> Of the 10 exchanges, only Binance isn’t a money services business (MSB)
Consider of course this was 2 years ago.
This whole space is utterly uninvestable.
So let me reverse the question -- on what basis do you believe these unregulated fly by night bucket shops are on the up and up? What have they done to prove their legitimacy to you?
[1] https://cointelegraph.com/news/bitwise-calls-out-to-sec-95-o...
Those things aren't just arbitrary numbers with no effect, if you are trading it's pretty noticable where the volume is higher even if you don't look at the order book.
You know 99% of all LTC trading on Coinbase was one account trading back and forth with itself a couple years ago. Spoof trading involves putting up a big order, then yanking it at the last second before it gets executed.
If you're the house, you can do literally anything if only the fox is watching the henhouse. As the peer response states, if you're the house, you know which orders are yours so there's zero risk of them accidentally getting filled. You put fake orders on the books, you fake close them, and report them as a real transaction in the log. The liquidity can just be pretend.
[1] https://www.complianceweek.com/regulatory-enforcement/cftc-f...
It's especially obvious when trading higher amounts or trading a smaller liquidity token in the first place. Maybe I can't verify the actual numbers but I can very much verify there's more liquidity etc. than when I do the same transactions on a smaller exchange (and I'm on ~5 exchanges).
If I use a slot machine a million times and I get higher payouts than at the casino next door, why should I consider it rigged?
This is just nonsense. I am getting all the benefits of high liquidity and volume, my orders actually execute and I take advantage of the smaller spread. You can posit whatever you want, but the more likely explanation is that the volume is indeed higher.
This was a common growth hack for exchanges. When a new exchange launched they wanted to feign liquidity to establish a sense of credibility. They literally copied feeds from peer exchanges until they bootstrapped.
After all, why would anyone trade at an illiquid exchange? How do you get the first people onboard? You pretend you already have a lot of people onboard. More volume = more credibility.
The question you should ask yourself is if nobody is looking, why would they ever stop?
[note] by "growth hack" I mean literally a felony in any other context, but in the crypto space shrug who cares I guess. After all in which jurisdiction would you even sue them lol. Thanks to the "beauty of the blockchain" they won't even tell you where they're based.