According to an article in yesterday’s New York Times (NYT), Brian Brooks departed the CEO position at Binance.US when a $100 million venture capital funding fell through. He’d been in the position for just over three months.
Brooks led the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) before joining Binance.US. At the time, his move to Binance.US raised some eyebrows because Binance is not seen as the poster child of compliance, particularly compared to Coinbase where Brooks worked before joining the OCC.
Binance has recently attracted regulator attention around the world. While Binance.US is a separate legal entity from the main Binance platform, it is 90% owned by Changpeng Zhao, who started and controls Binance.com, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange. The NYT said it was regulatory attention in the U.S. over money laundering and tax issues combined with the common ownership that concerned potential investors. GreatPoint Ventures confirmed to the NYT it considered investing and declined.
The funding was intended as the first step towards a future IPO, which Binance still claims is on the cards. Notably, Brooks lost out on the Coinbase IPO when he left to join the OCC. When he took on the OCC role in April 2020, he received $4.6 million for canceling his Coinbase options contract. Just a year later, the stock owned by Paul Grewal, his Coinbase replacement, was worth $300 million when Coinbase was listed.
Meanwhile, apart from regulatory attention, Binance is likely to get sued over a platform outage during a price crash on May 19. A Swiss crypto fund is financing litigation and a UK academic has made various allegations based on her research.
Regarding regulatory attention, in late June, the UK’s regulator, the FCA, issued a statement that “Binance Markets Limited is not permitted to undertake any regulated activity in the UK.”
Several other regulators, including from Hong Kong, Germany, Japan, Italy, and Thailand, followed with various warnings, with the Netherlands the latest to do so this week. Hong Kong initially raised the alarm over crypto derivatives related to listed stocks which Binance stopped offering last month. In late July, Binance said it would cease to offer all derivative products in Germany, Italy and the Netherlands.
