Can Binance Survive the SEC’s Charges?

And so, the question is whether Binance can continue business as usual, and whether it can really be – in the long term – a going concern. It’s an odd question, in a way, at least in my limited perspective, given the seriousness of the allegations in the SEC’s suit. Over-and-above the bog-standard “you didn’t get the appropriate license to operate, sir” complaints that Coinbase also faces, Binance and CZ have been accused of endangering customer funds, enabling if not facilitating wash trading on Binance.US, improperly moving customer funds without consent and a host of other issues.In other words, Binance’s legal troubles are in a category above Coinbase’s. The charges focus not just on the question of whether its listings are unregistered securities, but also around whether it misled customers about how their funds were deployed, and whether it was implicitly encouraging U.S. citizens to trade on a non-U.S.-based platform to which they were not supposed to have access.