Binance Halts GBP Deposits and Withdrawals

Only a month after halting U.S. dollar bank transfers, Binance is now being forced to cease processing British pound deposits and withdrawals as well. 

Only 1% of Users Impacted

Crypto companies keep struggling with their banking partners.

Global leading crypto exchange Binance will be suspending British pound deposits and withdrawals in the upcoming week. The changes have already come into effect for new users, while existing users will have until May 22 before seeing the service shut down.

“Paysafe, our fiat partner that provides GBP deposit and withdrawal services via bank transfers and via card to Binance users, has advised us that they will no longer be able to provide these services from May 22, 2023,” a Binance spokesperson told CoinDesk.

Last month, Binance announced that it would suspend deposits and withdrawals of U.S. dollars through bank transfers. The exchange indicated back then that the suspension would only affect 0.01% of its monthly active users. This time around, it stated that the GBP change would impact less than 1% of its users. The company assured that it was working to restart both services as soon as possible.

Binance’s suspension of GBP and USD transfers are likely due to banking woes. According to lead Bitcoin advocate Nic Carter, the U.S. government may be trying to crack down on the crypto industry by cutting it off from the banking sector—a strategy Carter termed Operation Choke Point 2.0. Carter claims that the scheme involves putting pressure on banking institutions to avoid providing their services to crypto companies on a “safety and soundness” basis.

Despite these headwinds, Binance made over $504 billion of spot trading volume in February—more than 61% of the entire market share.

Disclosure: At the time of writing, the author of this piece owned BTC, ETH, and several other crypto assets.