Posts Tagged ‘cryptocurrency’
Binance ex-CCO Faces $1.5M Fine
Don’t overlook this detail in the settlement announced Tuesday against Binance and its chief executive officer: the cryptocurrency exchange’s former chief compliance officer is also looking at a $1.5 million penalty and severe restrictions on any future compliance career he might want to have. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which gets a piece of the…
Read MoreThe Bonkers Allegations Against Binance
You may have heard by now that earlier this week, regulators filed a lawsuit against cryptocurrency trading platform Binance. I just read the complaint, and have good news: however whacko your own company’s bad habits might be, the allegations against Binance are way more crazy. The regulator responsible for this bombshell of bizarreness is the…
Read MoreAnother Regulator Talks ‘Gatekeepers’
We’ve seen a lot of mess in the cryptocurrency world lately. Last week a leading voice on the Commodity Futures and Trading Commission called for one specific group to step up and do better with this bedraggled bit of the finance industry: gatekeepers. CFTC commissioner Christy Goldsmith Romero, a Democratic appointee and head of the…
Read MoreLessons From Coinbase’s Compliance Flop
Another week, another scandal in the cryptocurrency world that offers lessons in corporate compliance for the rest of us. This time around the culprit is trading platform Coinbase, which just agreed to pay $50 million to New York state regulators and to spend another $50 million over the next two years to improve its compliance…
Read MoreThe One Super-Big Lesson of FTX
People keep asking me what lessons the compliance and audit community might learn from the spectacular collapse of cryptocurrency platform FTX Corp. The more I contemplate FTX’s shortcomings, however, the more I believe the answer to that question is simply “all of them.” Just read the bankruptcy petition filed on Nov. 17 by newly named…
Read MoreA GRC Analysis of FTX Implosion
I try to avoid writing about the cryptocurrency business because it’s such an isolated field, led by oddballs and filled with esoteric operations not really relevant to compliance professionals here in the non-crypto world. The bankruptcy of crypto exchange FTX, however, is an exception — a story that’s flat-out crazy, with compliance lessons galore. For…
Read MoreThe Bittrex Sanctions Settlement
Before we all rush into the weekend, compliance officers should take a look at that enforcement action against cryptocurrency platform Bittrex that was announced earlier this week. It offers some valuable lessons about building a sanctions compliance program on the fly and what regulators expect crypto firms to do for sanctions risk. The enforcement action…
Read MoreRobinhood Crypto Compliance Meltdown
New York financial regulators have issued a scorcher of an enforcement action against Robinhood, hitting the online trading app with a $30 million for allowing a weak compliance program that, in turn, allowed a wide range of other compliance failures. The New York Department of Financial Services (DFS) announced the sanction on Tuesday. The precise…
Read MoreSEC Launches Crypto Push
The Securities and Exchange Commission made three notable enforcement moves in the cryptocurrency world last week, clearly sending a signal to this Wild West part of the capital markets that the SEC wants to bring some law and order to town. First, the agency announced that it is adding 20 enforcement agents to its cyber…
Read MoreBinance Compliance Hiring Spree
The chief executive of cryptocurrency exchange Binance just published an interesting statement, promising to double the size of the firm’s compliance team by the end of this year and to invest in various other compliance program efforts — all while regulators around the world are putting Binance and its operations under a microscope. Changpeng Zhao,…
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