During an FTX-focused hearing held by the Senate Banking Committee, Senator Bill Hagerty (R-TN) said that Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, is controlled by the Chinese government.
I wanna stay on this concern that I have. Particularly, about Binance. About the Chinese Communist Party’s role and support of that. To be clear, Binance is being proliferated around the world. It's a [Chinese] state-backed network.
Hagerty claims that Binance is doing business in emerging markets in “a very predatory fashion.”
The lawmaker noted that Binance is nearly seven times larger than FTX by trading volume. Furthermore, he predicts that the exchange’s market share will only grow now that its main rival has collapsed.
If Binance were to implode like FTX, that would have “catastrophic” consequences, Hagerty says.
The senator is concerned by the fact that there is no transparency regarding Binance’s reserves, and the influence that U.S. regulators can have on these exchanges is limited.
The senator also voiced his concerns about the dominance of the USD as the world's reserve currency.
Binance was founded in China back in 2017, but the exchange was forced to move out of the country due to the government's crackdown on crypto trading.
In a blog post published in September, Binance CEO Chanpeng Zhao, who is a Canadian citizen, denied having ties to the Chinese government. Zhao also claims that the world's largest exchange doesn't have any legal entities in China.
Arman Shirinyan
