Reuters report about Binance’s relationship with Iranian exchanges; What was the response of Nobitex and Binance?

The Reuters news agency, which has been following the activities of Binance and the relationship of this exchange with Iranian users for some time, published a report two days ago in which, citing the data of the analysis platform Chainalysis, it claimed that despite the US sanctions against Iran, since In 2018, 8 billion dollars of digital currency transactions were made between Binance and Iranian users.

According to ErzDigital, in the Reuters report, it is said that 7.8 billion dollars, that is, 97.5% of this amount, was exchanged through the Iranian exchange Nobitex. According to this news agency, after Binance, Kocoin has been the most popular foreign exchange among Nobitex users since 2018 with $820 million in direct and indirect transactions.

Reuters has even mentioned in a part of its report that during this period, the American branch of the Binance exchange (Binance.US) also exchanged 1.5 million dollars with Nobitix, Wallex and Tetherland exchanges. Coin Nick Market, Iranikart, Robex and Cermix are among the other Iranian platforms mentioned by Reuters in its report.

Although Reuters has clearly pointed out in the final parts of its report that Nobitex or other Iranian exchanges by the US government They are not sanctioned And there is no evidence that Iranian sanctioned individuals and organizations use Binance, the release of this report was accompanied by the reaction of two exchanges, Binance and Nobitex.

Binance’s response to the Reuters report: We are not required to comply with US sanctions laws

The central claim of the Reuters report is that conducting transactions between Binance and Iranian platforms could put this exchange at risk of prosecution for violating the ban on doing business with Iran, which also includes secondary sanctions (sanction regulations that non-US companies are also required to comply with). . Chagri Poyraz, Binance Sanctions Compliance Manager, but without directly referring to the issue of secondary sanctions, says that the exchange is not an American company and therefore will not be required to follow US laws; Despite this, they always try to keep sanctioned entities away from their platform.

He even claimed in the first part of his note in response to the Reuters report that recently, after discovering a number of accounts related to Iranian exchanges that intended to transfer money through Binance, they blocked the said transaction and accounts.

However, the criticism of Binance’s director of compliance with sanctions regulations, according to Reuters, is that relying on blockchain data alone can lead to the formation of false assumptions and conclusions about the relationship of this exchange with funds related to sanctioned entities.

Piuraz said in his note about this:

The truth is that blockchain data doesn’t tell the whole story. An exchange may have received an unwanted transaction from an Iranian wallet. It is also possible to send an amount from an exchange to an address that was considered a legal (unsanctioned) address at the time of the transaction, but after analyzing the blockchain data, we come to the conclusion that that address is actually an intermediary for circumventing sanctions and in connection It has been with a sanctioned institution. The bottom line is that you can never determine the intent of a set based on blockchain data alone.

Piuraz also said that Binance has one of the strictest security measures to deal with this kind of transactions (related to sanctioned entities) and if they encounter such cases, they will immediately take action to fix the problem.

Nobitex’s response: The Reuters report is misleading

As it was said at the beginning, Reuters claimed in its report that since 2018, a significant amount of money has been transferred between Nobitex and Binance, and in addition, it has claimed that this Iranian exchange somehow played a role in circumventing sanctions by Iranian sanctioned persons.

In response to this report, Nobitex said that while the validity of the ChinaAlysis data collection is damaged, the way of referring to the statistics related to the exchange of 8 billion dollars between Iranian users and Binance since 2018 is also misleading.

Nobitix said in its statement:

Referring to these statistics and figures is misleading in that it may create the impression that this figure was transferred unilaterally from Nobitex to Binance, in the event that the claimed number is the total number of transactions made by Iranian users with Binance since the year It shows 2018. While a user may have moved a certain amount of assets multiple times between the internal and external platform and wallet for trading purposes. In the Reuters report, the sum of all these transactions was introduced as the volume of transactions without mentioning that these amounts were circulated many times. Emphasizing this volume of financial exchange, without referring to the number of transactions and the net amount of output or input, is a kind of distortion of reality that is done in line with specific goals.

Nobitex has said regarding Reuters’ claim that this exchange played a role in evading sanctions:

In the Reuters report, conducting cryptocurrency transactions in line with actions such as circumventing sanctions or withdrawing currency is interpreted as not correct. As a rule, these transactions were not one-way and from the Iranian platform to the foreign platform or personal wallets and had a back and forth process. On the other hand, platforms such as Binance, which have strict rules for identifying users, can never be a suitable destination for circumventing sanctions, and there are much simpler solutions such as decentralized platforms. Therefore, it is clear that the majority of such claims were simply not considering the truth of the purpose of users in using a foreign platform for trading.

Regarding the concerns of some users about the possibility of their capital being blocked in domestic exchanges, Nobitex has said in the final part of its statement, “As long as Iranian users carry out their activities in domestic platforms, there will be no risk to their cryptocurrency assets of a non-sanctioned nature.” became”.