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One of the more popular misconceptions about cryptocurrency exchange giant Binance has been around for a while now is that the company runs out of the blockchain-friendly island of Malta. Binance CEO, Changpeng Zhao, has stated that the company does not have a fixed centre of operations. The Malta Financial Services Authority (MFSA) has also made an official statement that the company does not have a license to operate within their jurisdiction.
BREAKING: Nothing has changed in Malta, for Binance or any other crypto exchanges. No licenses were granted to anyone by Malta, as of yet.
Some media, even crypto media, has such a bad habit of releasing misleading news that only hurts their own credibility and our industry. https://t.co/C9MdCngx70
— CZ 🔶 BNB (@cz_binance) February 21, 2020
Binance is not based in Malta
This official response has been posted in reply to a slew of media articles where the exchange has been named a “Malta-based” company. This misunderstanding is a consequence of Binance themselves announcing a relocation to the blockchain-friendly European country in 2018. In the same year, there were some charity relations between the country and Binance, which seemed to indicate something was going on. Since then the media had accidentally acknowledged that Binance was entirely based in Malta even when the trading platform did not have a single office in the country.
Malta Financial Services Authority Denied the rumours
The public statement from the MFSA states that at the moment, Binance is not authorized to run cryptocurrency operations in Malta. If there are any activities that the firm is running in the country, they are probably doing so without legal regulations for offering digital financial assets to the public. Zhao made a response to the issue stating that the firm has no operations in Malta and the entire issue has been a result of misconceptions, doubt, with just a few hints of truth in there somewhere.
Zhao has previously stated that their lack of a centralized work location has been part of their work to become an actual decentralized autonomous organization. He continued in his statement that in the present day when their core goal is building a decentralized ecosystem, they do not need to be headquartered in a single location to run their business. Regardless, Binance does hold regulatory licenses in other parts of the world where they operate.
The company’s main trademarks are registered in George Town at the Cayman Islands. Different sections of the company are registered to the specific jurisdictions they serve in. But this lack of a central operational location might mean that the exchange is striving to reach the status of a decentralized autonomous organization.
