Binance Uganda, the Binance-brand digital currency exchange that launched in 2018, will be shutting down for good on November 28th. According to Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao (CZ), Binance Uganda is shutting down because, “it’s a loss center for us because it’s not generating enough money to be profitable, and everybody uses Binance.com anyway.”
Binance.com, the main Binance exchange, has onramps and offramps for the Ugandan Shilling (UGX), which makes the Binance Uganda exchange redundant since the service offerings overlap.
“All the features that Binance Uganda provides [are] now covered by Binance.com together with our fiat channel partners. There’s a very minimal number of users on there [Binance Uganda], so it doesn’t make sense for us to maintain two platforms.”
The three-phase shutdown
Binance Uganda will be shutting down in three phases. Phase one, which already took place, closed user registration to the exchange as well as new deposits. Phase two, will take place on November 11th and close all trading services, which means Binance Uganda users will no longer be able to buy and sell digital currency through the exchange. Phase three will take place on November 28th, and will be what Binance is calling the “hard shutdown;” users will no longer be able to log in, access their accounts, or make withdrawals from the exchange.
The second Binance-brand shutdown in 30 days
The closure of Binance Uganda is the second Binance-brand exchange to shut down within 30 days. In late October, Binance also announced the shutdown of Binance Jersey. Similar to Binance Uganda, Binance Jersey has a three-phase shutdown and the day of its “hard shutdown” is November 30. Although Binance did not provide much of a reason regarding why Binance Jersey was shutting down, CZ said that Binance.com has better fiat gateways than Binance Jersey, which seems to imply that Binance Jersey is yet another redundant exchange with the same, if not fewer, features than its parent company.
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