Clients of the Binance crypto exchange are moving to other platforms

Clients of Binance, which is leaving the Russian Federation, are gradually moving to other platforms for trading cryptocurrencies. CommEX, which acquired the Russian business of Binance, expects about a million clients to transfer; trading activity has noticeably increased on other platforms.

The sale of the Russian business of the crypto exchange Binance (see Kommersant-Online on September 27) led to the transition of its Russian clients to other platforms, and not just to the CommEX company that bought its business. As Satoshkin CEO Dmitry Stepanin explained, this can be seen from the activity of p2p operations, which has noticeably decreased. According to professional p2p traders, the decrease was 10–30%, he noted. According to data from the P2P.Army service, which tracks the number of active advertisements on p2p platforms of various exchanges, at the beginning of 2023, Binance accounted for about 7.7 thousand advertisements for ruble p2p transactions per day. By the middle of the year, their number decreased to 6.3 thousand pieces, at the end of September – 3.4 thousand pieces. As of October 3, there were no data on ruble transactions on Binance.

First of all, according to Mr. Stepanin, crypto traders moved to the ByBit exchange, which “has been very active in marketing recently.” Additional inflows will also be received by other exchanges similar in functionality to Binance – Huobi, Bitget, Kucoin, Gate.io and others, he believes. And, according to the P2P.Army service, the number of active advertisements on other crypto exchanges was steadily growing. Huobi had 3.9–4 thousand units in the first half of the year, in September it grew to 4.3 thousand, and in early October to 4.5 thousand units. On the Bybit exchange, the number of advertisements in the first half of the year was 1.8 thousand, but at the beginning of autumn it reached 2.2 thousand, and in October it exceeded 2.7 thousand.

There are a very large number of users from the Russian Federation registered on Binance. “But everyone will have a personal choice whether to join us or try their luck with another platform,” CommEX CEO Anton Toroptsev told Kommersant. He assumes that the influx to the site will be about 1 million users. At the same time, independent financial analyst Andrei Barkhota estimates that at least 700 thousand Russians were registered on Binance. Binance refused to disclose the number of Russian clients.

The process of transferring clients from Binance will occur in stages. Currently, users can log into CommEX using a Binance account, but only basic KYC information and login details are shared. Within a week, according to Anton Toroptsev, it will be possible to transfer complete KYC data. Asset transfers are currently initiated exclusively by users. So, CommEX offers three options: do nothing, continue to use Binance and wait for further updates from them; register an account on CommEX using Binance data or register a new account on CommEX and, when the “time comes,” transfer assets from Binance yourself. Mr. Barhota believes that the translation process could take one to three months.

The main reason for Binance’s departure from Russia is pressure from American regulators, who have already accused the exchange of laundering money and circumventing sanctions using its platform, says Roman Nekrasov, co-founder of the ENCRY Foundation. At the same time, the crypto exchange introduced restrictions for Russians gradually. In 2022, it banned Russians from holding assets worth more than $10 thousand in their wallets. Then it banned the purchase of foreign currency on the p2p platform. This year, the exchange banned Russians from buying and selling cryptocurrencies for any currency other than rubles. At the same time, Binance, according to Mr. Barhota, earned $0.4–0.5 billion a year from Russians.

However, according to the head of InDeFi Smart Bank, Sergei Mendeleev, Binance “is not going anywhere, but is simply changing its sign for calm work with Russians.” So far, nothing in the design of documents and the company’s website reveals the Russian roots of the owners of the CommEX project, while the company is registered in the Seychelles and is focused on Asia and the CIS, noted Byzantium CEO Petr Bel. The main risk of trading “on a young, unknown platform with unknown beneficiaries and a dubious history of origin is the risk of losing funds as a result of a scam, a hacker attack, or a hole in the security system,” points out Roman Nekrasov.

Ksenia Kulikova