According to Bloomberg, the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has opened an investigation into Binance to find out if its BNB token was an unregistered security during the initial coin offering in 2017 or not. If evidence is found, Binance could be charged with selling unregistered securities.
Binance’s BNB token will certainly face many obstacles due to this investigation. The US has implemented some restrictions for Binance. The exchange is now only allowed to operate under the domain name Binance.us instead of Binance.com. Besides SEC, Binance is currently under investigation in the U.S. by the Justice Department, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) and the Internal Revenue Service.
In response, Binance said that “it would not be appropriate for us to comment on our ongoing conversations with regulators” and the company “will continue to meet all requirements set by regulators”. Meanwhile, SEC declined to comment.
BNB is currently the world’s fifth largest cryptocurrency by market cap with nearly $50 billion. BNB was originally issued as an ERC-20 token, running on the Ethereum network, with a total supply of 200 million coins. Currently, the total supply of this coin is just over 165 million tokens.
When it first launched, BNB was priced at just $0.15 and peaked last year at nearly $700 per coin, then hovered around the $300-400 range. After the SEC’s investigation was revealed, the price of BNB dropped by more than 10%, from $310 to $276.
Follow our channels for more crypto news:
- Cryptory Insights: https://t.me/CryptoryInsights
- Cryptory Global Community: https://t.me/CryptoryCommunity
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/CryptoryNetwork
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/CryptoryNetwork