Binance has found a buyer – Kommersant FM

Binance has intrigued the market: one of the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchanges announced that it is selling its business in Russia. The process will take at least a year, and the little-known company CommEX has been announced as the buyer. The transaction amount was also not disclosed. At the same time, as Binance management assured, all assets of current Russian users are safe and securely protected. What does the departure of this site from the country mean? And what could it mean for its clients? Vladimir Rasulov found out.

Binance began actively working in Russia in 2019. And, according to media reports, in just a couple of years the country has become the second largest cryptocurrency market in the world after China in terms of trading volumes.

Then the exchange turned out to be one of the few ways to transfer funds abroad when several Russian banks were disconnected from the SWIFT system. But on September 27, users became tense: the platform announced that it was selling its business in Russia to CommEX and plans to transfer client assets to the platform with the same name.

Binance has long been a convenient tool for transactions with cryptocurrency, its client, adviser to the Lidings law firm Dmitry Kirillov, admitted to Kommersant FM.

Now he decided to take a break and is in no hurry to enter a new platform: “When I needed cryptocurrency for some calculations, this was the easiest way to buy it for fiat. I was not looking for a very profitable rate with the risks of exchanging for crypto in unverified places. Binance offered a normal service.

As for CommEX, I withdrew both fiat and crypto just in case. I’m not going to this site yet, I’ll see how events develop, what will happen to it next.”

At the same time, the buyer of the Russian business Binance is quite unusual. The CommEX exchange, judging by the information in its official Telegram channel, was created just the other day, just a day before the announcement of the deal.

And it is possible that it is directly related to the structures of the seller, says cryptocurrency market analyst Viktor Pershikov. However, after Binance leaves the country, there are other alternatives, the expert emphasizes:

“It would be strange to completely leave Russia, to lose this market, without giving Russian citizens the opportunity to work through some affiliated platform.

While CommEX is such a dark horse, there is no telling whether it can be considered as an alternative to OKX, KuCoin and Bybit. There is a really large layer of large capitalized crypto exchanges that offer services to Russians without any restrictions.”

After the start of the military operation in Ukraine, Binance actively restricted Russian clients amid accusations of supporting the circumvention of US sanctions. In March 2022, the site closed access to P2P transactions, directly from user to user in dollars and euros.

In August 2023, the Wall Street Journal wrote that in July alone, the exchange processed transactions involving the exchange of rubles for cryptocurrency for $8 billion. After which, according to the newspaper, the US Department of Justice began an investigation into the site. As a result, the exchange banned transactions with any currency other than Russian through its own P2P platform.

Transferring assets from Binance to CommEX can be done quite easily, although not for all instruments, says Digital & Analogue Partners partner Yuri Brisov:

“Cryptocurrency transactions are not carried out on the Binance exchange, but on the blockchain. We can compare this to the fact that we use rubles and can store them either in bank A or in bank B. If bank B says that it will stop working within six months, then we comfortably move to bank A. Roughly the same situation will happen with crypto assets as well.

It will be more difficult here with NFTs, because this market is very tied to the platforms that issue these tokens and on which they are traded.”

Meanwhile, those wishing to conduct transactions with crypto assets began to have problems with alternatives to Binance. The OKX exchange, for example, banned transactions with the ruble at the end of August, and the Bybit platform stopped accepting cards from sanctioned Russian banks. So the circle of crypto opportunities for Russians is obviously narrowing noticeably.

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