New York CNN –
Binance and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission agreed to avoid a full freeze on the platform’s U.S. assets and keep customers’ assets in the United States, after a U.S. district judge granted a consent order filed on Saturday had signed.
The settlement was reached amid a wide-ranging ongoing SEC lawsuit that could take months, if not years, to resolve alleging that the company operates an illegal securities exchange.
The defendants, who include CEO Changpeng Zhao, agreed to the repatriation of assets held for the benefit of US clients. The deal ensures those assets are protected and remain in the United States to prevent them from being moved overseas, the consent order said.
“With 13 indictments, we allege that Zhao and Binance entities are engaged in an extensive web of deception, conflicts of interest, lack of disclosure and deliberate evasion of the law,” SEC Chairman Gary Gensler said in a statement accompanying the lawsuit in June.
Binance Holdings officials, including Zhao, will also have no control over these assets, the agreement said. The assets and monies expressly cannot be transferred to them, the agreement states, and remain under domestic control.
The order also prohibits the defendants from using the company’s assets for anything other than “in the ordinary course of business.” They must give the regulator control over spending, the SEC said Saturday.
The The SEC said Saturday it had secured emergency aid to protect US clients’ assets.
“Given that Changpeng Zhao and Binance have control over the assets of the platforms’ clients and have been able to commingle client assets or redirect client assets at will, as we have claimed, these prohibitions are essential to protecting investor assets importance,” said Gurbir S. Grewal, director of the SEC’s enforcement division, added that the agreement ensures US customers can continue to withdraw their assets.
The commission is cracking down on the world’s largest crypto companies and also filed a scathing complaint against Coinbase in early June. The industry has long been in the spotlight due to a lack of regulatory oversight.
As Portal reported, in early June, the SEC asked a federal court to issue an injunction freezing Binance’s U.S. assets.
When asked for comment, Binance.US referred CNN to a Twitter thread on Sunday that said the company looks forward to continuing to defend itself in court.
“This fight has damaged our business and our reputation, but not our fighting spirit or our determination to defend ourselves against false accusations and ‘regulate by enforcement’ tactics that have no place in our justice system,” the tweet reads calledthe addition of the earlier request for an asset freeze would have effectively brought the business to a halt.