US regulators will now have access to years of Binance transaction data

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One attraction of Binance, as the company grew from its 2017 founding into the biggest cryptocurrency exchange in the world, was the firm's freewheeling flouting of rules. As it amassed well over 100 million crypto-trading users globally, it openly told the United States government that, as an offshore operation, it didn't have to comply with the country's financial regulations and money-laundering laws.

Then, late last month, those years of brushing off US regulators caught up with the company in the form of one the most punitive money-laundering criminal settlements in the history of the US Justice Department. The crackdown doesn't just mean a chastened Binance will have to change its practices going forward. It means that when the company is sentenced in a matter of months, it will be forced to open its past books to regulators, too. What was once a haven for anarchic crypto commerce is about to be transformed into the opposite: perhaps the most fed-friendly business in the cryptocurrency industry, retroactively offering more than a half-decade of users' transaction records to US regulators and law enforcement.

When the Department of Justice announced on November 21 that Binance's executives had agreed to plead guilty to criminal money-laundering charges, much of the attention on that settlement focused on founder Changpeng Zhao giving up his CEO role and on the company's record-breaking $4.3 billion fine. But Binance's settlement agreements with the DOJ and the US Treasury Department also stipulate a strict new regime of data-sharing with law enforcement and regulators. The company has agreed to comply with regulators' "requests for information"—a term that carries none of the evidence or suspicion requirements necessary for obtaining a warrant or even a subpoena—to the point of producing any "information, testimony, document, record, or other tangible evidence."