complaint, filed in a federal court in Washington, D.C., listed 13 charges against Binance, Zhao and the operator of its purportedly independent U.S. exchange.
Binance created separate U.S. entities “as part of an elaborate scheme to evade U.S. federal securities laws,” the SEC also alleged, citing a number of practices first reported by Reuters in a series of investigations into the exchange published thisyear and in 2022.From almost three years ago until June 2022, a trading firm owned and controlled by Zhao, Sigma Chain, engaged in so-called wash trading that artificially inflated the trading volume of crypto asset securities on the Binance.
Binance.US, which is ultimately controlled by Zhao, said in a tweet that the lawsuit was “unjustified by the facts, by theBitcoin, the world’s biggest cryptocurrency, fell as much as six per cent on the news to its lowest in almost three months. “I think that there’s a big risk here that this could be crippling to Binance,” said Ed Moya, senior market analyst at Oanda.LEGAL HEADACHES