Binance embraces criminality with privacy coin lending

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With nearly every single decision, Binance has repeatedly proven that rather than attempting to be an upstanding on-ramp to the cryptocurrency industry, their priority lays in being a cryptocurrency gambling space, laws be damned. They proved that again recently, as they announced their three latest Binance Lending Products: Monero (XMR), Zcash (ZEC) and Dash.

If you’re unfamiliar with Binance Lending Products, they can be explained pretty easily. The concept is to “subscribe” to one of the offered products, hold onto it, and collect interest. In effect, it’s not that different to what most BTC users do, except with the added benefit of interest.

In the announcement of the three new lending products, Binance outlined the products would be available for 14 day lending periods each, with fixed interest rates and subscription caps.

There’s two problems with this offering. The first, which is a problem with all of Binance’s lending products, is that it is just a long term bet on digital currencies rather than day trading. It’s effectively just another option to gamble on crypto rather than to use it for anything of value.

The second problem is the embrace of privacy coins. All three coins now listed as lending products on Binance’s site were recently dropped by the OKEx exchange, specifically because they would fail to pass regulatory tests in South Korea. Binance apparently isn’t bothered by regulations, and pushes on.

These three cryptos, focused on creating anonymous money, have repeatedly been proven to have very little actual use outside of criminal elements in society, and governments remained concerned that criminals will use them for those purposes.

As South Korea has proven, countries will regulate against them, pushing the cryptos even further into the underground where they will only have use for illicit purposes. Binance, by embracing XMR, ZEC and Dash, embraces that world, and will be regulated against just the same.

While Binance tries to pretend they are the good guys of the crypto industry, don’t be fooled by it. The actions they take will have the worst consequences.