Matt Levine’s Money Stuff: The CFTC Comes for Binance

Binance

A decent rule of thumb is that all cryptocurrency exchanges are doing crimes, and if you’re lucky your exchange is doing only process crimes. Today the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission sued Binance Holdings Ltd., Changpeng Zhao’s big crypto derivatives exchange, for letting Americans trade crypto derivatives. There are no accusations that Binance is stealing customer money, or even taking big risks with it, which makes Binance look better than some other crypto exchanges I could name. There are … look, there are not no accusations that Binance is laundering money for terrorists or secretly trading against its customers, ...