The Ontario securities watchdog has published a list of 13 firms targeting residents without an operating license, and for the second time this month, KuCoin has made the list.
As CoinGeek reported earlier this month, the Ontario Securities Commission (OSC) published a list of 10 firms that were serving residents in the province without a license. The biggest profile on the list was KuCoin, the Seychelles exchange which the OSC banned from Canada in June for operating an unregistered digital asset trading platform.
In its latest alert, published on August 23, the OSC has listed two KuCoin subsidiaries, namely MEK Global Limited, Phoenixfin Pte. Ltd and Phoenixfin Pte. Ltd., MEK Global Limited.
The OSC’s actions against the two firms were upheld by the Capital Markets Tribunal, which ruled that they “sold crypto contracts and crypto futures contracts through their global online crypto asset trading platform (KuCoin Platform), without complying with the registration and prospectus requirements under Ontario securities law.”
KuCoin has not responded to the continuous listings by the OSC months after it was permanently banned from operating in Canada’s most populated province, home to 14.2 million residents.
KuCoin is just one of the many global digital asset companies that have been at loggerheads with the OSC in recent years. The watchdog has cracked down on exchanges such as Bitfinex, OKEx, ByBit, Poloniex, CoinLaunch, and BitMEX.
Binance was also ordered to stop serving Ontario residents. However, unlike all the others, it tried to be clever and continued to operate while claiming to have exited the market. The OSC quickly busted it and forced it to leave the market, for real this time.
It’s not just the exchanges that the OSC has gone after. A year ago, the watchdog banned Tether from exchanges, the first such action against a digital asset.
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