Binance: KYC integration has reduced the number of users by 90%

Leading members of Binance's compliance team have responded to allegations of fraud against the largest cryptocurrency exchange.

The British news agency Reuters recently published a series of reports investigating Binance’s illegal activities. The journalists claimed that Binance «has become a center of criminal activity and overlooked several signs of money laundering.»

Reuters also noted that the Russian-language darknet market Hydra is closely linked to Binance’s user base. According to the news agency, the exchange has facilitated $ 780 million in Hydra-related payments since 2017.

Currently, Binance’s compliance team is headed by former investigators of the US Internal Revenue Service’s Cybercrime Unit ,Tigran Gambaryan and Matthew Price. Both specialists played a role in the destruction of the well-known darknet markets Hydra, AlphaBay, and Silk Road .

Theexchange has also attracted Chagri Poiraz,a former HSBC sanctions expert . He will become the new global head of sanctions compliance.

Matthew Price responded to the accusations of Binance’s connection with Hydra:

«Yes, Hydra was huge. And yes, it did do business in Russia, so that’s like saying Bank of America supports money laundering for drug cartels. The only role that KYC played was to reduce the number of (potential) users. Those who wanted to do «dirty things» simply left the exchange and started using LocalBitcoins first, and then face-to-face meetings or DeFi. Exchanges are not a place where dirty money is collected. It’s offline. If a criminal had tried to use Binance, the transaction would have been picked up by transaction monitoring.

Tigran Ghambaryan:

«You can’t control the money coming in. You can’t control the deposits. If you take into account the illegal funds that come in besides the total volume of exchange, yes, there are some. However, there is a lot of money coming in. Binance is better or the same as most financial exchanges. In some areas, we were much better than Kraken and Coinbase, in some areas , we wereworse. But there is not a single case where we ignore. We operate in different jurisdictions. This complicates our work. However, there is nothing that screams that Binance is a den of criminal activity.»