The head of the Ukrainian Binance Kyrylo Khomyakov gave an interview to the Ukrainian media UBR, in which he shared interesting insights about the work of the cryptocurrency exchange. We publish the most interesting moments of his statements.
Is there a future in e-hryvnia?
Here it is important to understand that the CBDC, ie the electronic currency of central banks, is not a competitor to cryptocurrency. This is a completely different tool that increases transparency and control over the circulation of national currency for regulators, reduces fees by eliminating the need to work through commercial banks in terms of payments and increase the overall efficiency and speed of all payments within the country.
It has nothing to do with cryptocurrencies, volatility, etc. In my opinion, this is just a more convenient tool for managing the national currency. There are different opinions on this issue, but the most interesting thing is that so far we do not see the effective use of CBDC in any country in the world. Therefore, as far as I know, such projects are currently being considered by the Ukrainian government and the National Bank, but are not yet available to all people. Tested in pilot mode.
Is it true that the stock exchange froze the cryptocurrencies of Lavrov’s and Peskov’s daughters? Does Binance continue to participate in sanctions against Russia? Can many assets be blocked?
So it’s true. This is one of the last sanctions we have applied. Since the beginning of hostilities globally, Binance has applied all sanctions initiated by all governments: both European and American. But even before that, the level of our KYC, our compliance, was very high, it was always aimed at identifying and deterring the risks of financial crimes. We have more than 500 people working in compliance with the company around the world.
We have applied all sanctions, and also frozen operations with sanctioned banks in Russia – all P2P operations. We were also the only ones to apply the EU’s fifth package of restrictive measures, which includes blocking Russian accounts with more than € 10,000 in cryptocurrency balances.
Of course, if governments impose new sanctions, including a ban on access to the platform for users, we will support them.
Over the past few years, Binance has periodically appeared in the news of the Cyber Police of Ukraine as a partner who helped law enforcement officers catch fraudsters. But there have been no such reports for a long time. Why?
In general, if you look at the statistics even for the last year, the number of cybercrimes is growing, because the market is growing, and the number of people who are “in cryptocurrency” is growing. Accordingly, we are even more concerned about the security of our users and that they do not fall into any history of phishing or other cryptocurrency fraud.
There are a number of, so to speak, areas we are working on. Now we see that there are even risks of money laundering in the field of NFT, in the field of interaction with certain dark markets, and so on.
We have a comprehensive and strategic approach to the security of our users: KYC, AML, ensuring the control of PEP statuses and the effectiveness of various mechanisms that we use to monitor transactions and protect our users.