Update: the CEO of Binance, Changpeng Zhao has made a post on Twitter denying that the exchange has “received any mandates” from the Financial Services Agency and describing Nikkei’s report as “irresponsible journalism.”
Nikkei showed irresponsible journalism. We are in constructive dialogs with Japan FSA, and have not received any mandates. It does not make sense for JFSA to tell a newspaper before telling us, while we have an active dialog going on with them.
— CZ (not giving crypto away) (@cz_binance) March 22, 2018
Japan is set to issue a warning against crypto exchange Binance, according to a report from the news outlet Nikkei, March 22.
Binance, the number one exchange by 24 hour volume according to CoinMarketCap, was affected by a hack on March 7, impacting users that had issued API keys on their accounts.
Twitter crypto person @WhalePanda shared @BTCVIC’s tweet, wondering how Bitcoin’s (BTC) price will react to the alleged warning:
“Quite interesting how #Bitcoin reacts to this, even though Binance is just a s***coin exchange with no fiat on-ram”
Several Twitter commentators on @WhalePanda’s post saw the sharing of the future purported warning as just spreading FUD in the crypto sphere, while others seemed to confirm the legitimacy of the upcoming warning through personal private channels:
Let the FUD commence! pic.twitter.com/ZHZkJIIObk
— Albit Coinstein (@AlbitCoinstein) March 22, 2018
Not fud. I spoke to people in the know and they've asked binance to take down the Japanese translation to discourage Japanese to use their platform
— Henno van Rensburg (@hennokun) March 22, 2018
Japan’s Financial Services Agency (FSA) had begun inspecting crypto exchanges in the wake of the January hack of over $500 mln NEM stored on a low security hot wallet at exchange Coincheck. The FSA has issued seven “punishment notices” to as-of-yet unregistered Japanese exchanges, as well as temporarily halting operations at two more, for a lack of “the proper and required internal control systems.”