Crypto News Today: Binance Fined $4.3M in Canada, Marathon Digital’s Shares Surge 184%

Binance Hit with $4.3 Million Fine in Canada

Canadian financial regulators levied a C$6 million ($4.3 million) fine against leading cryptocurrency exchange Binance citing two separate “administrative violations” of the country’s financial regulations.

The Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canada (FINTRAC), the nation’s financial intelligence unit, said in a press release that Binance failed to register as a foreign money services business despite being given “several opportunities” to do so.

The regulator also said Binance neglected to report nearly 6,000 cryptocurrency transactions above $10,000 and their related know-your-customer information to it, between June 1, 2021 and July 19, 2023. The agency identified these violations through blockchain analysis tools.

This penalty follows a tumultuous period for Binance, with the exchange agreeing in November 2023 to pay U.S. authorities $4.3 billion for violating anti-money laundering laws and its former CEO Changpeng Zhao recently being sentenced to four months in prison.

The exchange has also recently come under fire after investigators identified $300 million worth of wash trades allegedly conducted by a large client that was said to be manipulating the market. Binance denied these allegations and said it has “offboarded nearly 355,000 users with a transaction volume of more than $2.5 trillion” for violating its terms of use.”

Bitcoin Miner Marathon Digital’s Profits Soared 184% on Crypto Price Surge

Major Bitcoin mining firm Marathon Digital (MARA)has reported it mined 2,811 BTC worth around $176 million in the first quarter of the year, with the cryptocurrency’s rising price helping boost its profit by 184% year-on-year to $337.2 million.

Marathon Digital’s revenue rose 223% from the first quarter of 2023 to $165.2 million as it adds an additional 45 exahash of mining capacity and maintains $1.6 billion of liquidity.

Marathon Digital also revealed that it sold a little over a quarter of the Bitcoin mined during the first quarter to cover operating costs.

WisdomTree Expands Crypto App to New York Amid Internal Strife

Asset management giant WisdomTree has launched its digital asset app, WisdomTree Prime, in New York even as its CEO faces pressure from shareholders over the firm’s push into crypto.

The app, already available in 21 states, allows users to buy, sell, and hold Bitcoin, Ethereum, dollar-backed stablecoins, and gold tokens, and has received a charter to operate as a limited-purpose trust company under the New York Banking law earlier this year.

However, WisdomTree’s foray into the cryptocurrency sector has seen the firm’s largest shareholder, Graham Tuckwell, at odds with CEO Jonathan Steinberg’s aggressive decentralized finance (DeFi) push.

Tuckwell, chairman of ETFS Capital, has reportedly urged investors to vote against Steinberg’s reappointment, arguing that the CEO’s DeFi initiatives have been “a massive distraction and utterly unsuccessful.” Tuckwell became a major WisdomTree shareholder in 2018 through the acquisition of ETF Securities’ European arm, a company he founded.

WisdomTree first entered the cryptocurrency market in 2019 with the launch of a Bitcoin exchange-traded product on the Swiss stock exchange SIX. Earlier this year, it became one of the issuers of spot Bitcoin ETFs in the United States, with its fund seeing inflows of around $70 million while others including BlackRock’s IBIT saw billions in inflows.

Top Exchanges See Trading Volume Decline in April

Top cryptocurrency exchanges saw their trading volumes decline in April, with Binance (Grade A) seeing a 39.2% drop to $679 trillion, followed by Bybit (Grade AA), which lost 26.9% of its volume to trade $133 billion.

OKX (Grade A), Coinbase (Grade AA), and Bitget (Grade A) followed in total trading volumes, with drops between 43.4% in the case of Coinbase and 10.3% for Bitget, and volumes between $126 billion (OKX) and $81.2 billion (Bitget).

Dig deeper into the world of cryptocurrency trading with CCData’s latest Exchange Review report.