You'll find the same situation over at Binance. All of these exchanges (even Robinhood who just updated a ticket I opened weeks ago) buckled under the load of the increased participation.
I signed up for Binance.US about two months back. It’s legit but a very low quality offering. Support is just massively overwhelmed and unresponsive. But most exchanges are overwhelmed now so it’s not that unusual.
How is this ok? A market crash multiple exchanges go down and/or withdrawals certainly become very hard - this was submitted earlier to hn about Binance:
Back in 2017 when there was an new coin spiking every day Binance was by far the easiest place to sign up and trade. Everywhere else had either much stricter KYC or a much worse reputation.
It’s likely Binance was so much easier because they were ignoring KYC laws, but I’m not a lawyer.
Surprised this isn’t a slam dunk. One of the main reasons Binance is popular is because in the 2017 crypto run up they made it easier than anyone else to get an account and start trading. It seemed obvious at the time they couldn’t be compliant with AML/KYC laws and they were using lax policy there to outrun the competition.
In the past 24 hours, Binance has still had nearly 7x the volume of their nearest competitor. They don't need to operate in markets that show any hostility towards them. That has always been their strategy, and it's served them well. They are by far the largest exchange. Having to hire whole teams of overpriced lawyers to babysit each high maintenance market would just slow them down.
I'm a US citizen, so I don't really care what happens with Binance, but they started being openly hostile to US users maybe 6 or so years ago, for obvious reasons. They don't care, and they don't need to care. The weird part to me IMO is how aggressively some US citizens have still tried to use Binance, which means creating fake identity documents, using VPNs, and risking their account getting locked if they make any mistakes.
Why? Maybe it's a different subset of crypto users who did not want to go with binance in the first place, and are not likely to stay in binance for whatever reasons. And it's not like binance is running out of customers
Also Binance is quite simply a better exchange. It works flawlessly even when the market is hot. The quality of what they've developed and the speed at which they did it makes the average silicon valley team look like 7 year olds.
They are not taking Binance down. They are hair-cutting its dominance. It has happened before with Bitfinex and Bitmex. Both platforms still operate. My take is that Binance will keep operating but the crack down will significantly impact its business.
This seems like a conspiracy theory: every time an exchange gets too big, the US cracks down on it. But it might be the US is concerned that something gets too big to get out of its control? We already know that P2P and small exchanges are out of control due to sheer size.
reply