Friday Binance brouhaha

Dear readers,

Life in the media is often an uneventful lull followed by a frantic rush.

Such was the case with our story last Friday on how a Binance loophole may allow users to skirt the Singapore ban, which illustrates the dance between crypto players and regulators.

Image credit: Timmy Loen

The story focuses on how the cryptocurrency exchange had a placeholder called “Local” that allowed anyone on its peer-to-peer (P2P) marketplace to trade at any exchange rate, including Singapore dollars.

We asked whether this feature would violate the Monetary Authority of Singapore’s order for Binance.com to halt payment services to the country’s residents.

As we prepared the piece for publication, Binance removed “Local” on Friday – right before its own 12 p.m. deadline for taking down Singapore-dollar trading pairs.

This was interesting to us: Why drop the placeholder if it was mainly used for other currencies like the Malaysian ringgit? Perhaps Binance was concerned that it might run afoul of MAS?

Regardless, this meant that we had to make drastic, last-minute edits to the story before releasing it.

We thought that we had closed the chapter. But then we found out – perhaps belatedly – that Binance’s vendors on the P2P marketplace seemed to have found another loophole in the Singapore ban by advertising their services under Brunei dollars, which is pegged to the Singapore dollars.

This led us to rush out another round of editing, including a headline change.

The Binance loophole story was a week-long dash to the finish line. We had only decided to get the ball rolling early last week, after we published a feature about why angry investors are trying to sue Binance on September 6.

The irate investor piece, meanwhile, came out two days ahead of schedule, thanks to the fast-moving developments spurred by the MAS order, which drove up reader interest in Binance.

Fortunately, not all stories are like that. We had ample time to prepare our analysis on how Sea Group can become the next advertising powerhouse. While news about Sea-owned Shopee’s surprising expansion into Poland broke last week, our feature focused on a revenue stream that would take years to grow into its potential.