The world’s largest Bitcoin exchange has announced that it will take its controversial stock tokens off the market again.
On Friday, July 16, Binance announced that it would no longer offer any share tokens with immediate effect. This comes from a blog entry on the world’s largest Bitcoin exchange in terms of trading volume emerged.
Today we announce that we will end support for share tokens on Binance.com in order to shift our commercial focus to other product offerings. Effective immediately, share tokens will no longer be available for purchase on Binance.com, and Binance.com will no longer support share tokens after 2021-10-14 19:55 (UTC).
The Exchange does not provide any information on the exact reasons. However, it can be assumed that the step represents a concession to the international financial market regulators. In the last few weeks and months, the Exchange has taken these to their chests. The stock tokens in particular have set the alarm bells ringing at the financial market watchdogs. Words of warning in this regard recently came from the Italian stock exchange regulator, who pointed out to savers that Binance was not authorized to offer the stock tokens it classified as securities on the Italian market. The German Federal Financial Supervisory Authority had previously published a similar warning.
BaFin has duly justified suspicions that Binance Deutschland GmbH & Co. KG in Germany may have published securities in the form of “share tokens” with the designations TSLA / BUSD, COIN / BUSD and MSTR / BUSD without the required prospectuses on the https website : //www.binance.com/de publicly offers.
BaFin warned of the new investment vehicle at the end of April.
European special route: Stock tokens migrate from Binance to CM-Equity
The stock tokens are synthetic assets that track the price of a share. They are not to be confused with security tokens, which are digitally securitized securities. Nevertheless, the stock tokens are covered in a ratio of 1: 1 with the corresponding share. The traders do not trade the stock tokens with one another, but with the German asset manager CM-Equity AG. As can be seen from the Binance announcement, the Munich-based company is now building a platform on which investors from the European Economic Area and Switzerland can continue to trade the stock tokens. Unlike Binance, the Munich-based company is fully BaFin-regulated.
The new portal should open in two to four weeks, but no later than October 15th. Users have to go through a new KYC process when migrating their stock tokens from Binance to CM-Equity.