Who Is Binance?

Needless to say another type of analysis of the BTC markets is Fundamental Analysis, where the investor bases his assumptions as to the development of the courses, based on the economic situations prevailing and the impact it will have on Bitcoin. Reuters cross-checked these figures with another analysis firm, which agreed with the findings. This is all told by technical analysis with the help of Bitcoin price chart. Several friends who used Hydra told her Binance was the safest way to Youtu pay dealers, Alexandra told Reuters, speaking on condition she be identified only with her first name. Before his arrest, Pavlov told the BBC he ran a licensed server company and was not aware it was hosting Hydra. Meanwhile, his company is extending its reach into traditional business, announcing a $200 million investment in media group Forbes this year and committing $500 million to Tesla boss Elon Musk’s bid to take over Twitter.

As of late May, Binance was processing Monero trades worth around $50 million a day, far more than other exchanges, according to data from the CoinMarketCap website. The data showed that from 2017 to 2022, buyers and sellers on the world’s largest darknet drugs market, a Russian-language site called Hydra, used Binance to make and receive crypto payments worth $780 million. The United States sanctioned Lazarus in 2019 over cyber attacks designed to support North Korea’s weapons programmes, calling it an instrument of the country’s intelligence service - an accusation Pyongyang called "vicious slander." North Korea’s mission to the United Nations did not respond to emailed questions. For the past five years, Binance has allowed traders on its platform to buy and sell a coin called Monero, a cryptocurrency that offers users anonymity. As early as March 2018, Hydra users recommended on the site’s Russian-language forums that buyers use Binance to make purchases, citing the anonymity Binance afforded its clients at the time by allowing them to register with just an email address.

It isn’t possible to contact users through the forum so Reuters was unable to reach these people for comment. As reported by Reuters in its January investigation, an internal document shows that Binance was aware of the risk of illegal finance in Russia. Binance’s compliance department assigned Russia an "extreme" risk rating in 2020 in an assessment that was reviewed by Reuters. Eterbase’s lost money is part of a torrent of illicit funds that flowed through Binance from 2017 to 2021, a Reuters investigation has found. Crypto flows between Binance and Hydra dropped sharply after the exchange tightened its customer checks in August 2021, the data from Crystal Blockchain shows. In August 2020, hackers hijacked a cryptocurrency wallet belonging to an Australian man named Steve Kowalski by tricking him into downloading malware, Kowalski said in a witness statement to Australian police. Several hours later, the hackers opened at least two dozen anonymous accounts on Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, enabling them to convert the stolen funds and obscure the money trail, correspondence between Slovakia’s national police and Binance reveals.

In as little as nine minutes, using only encrypted email addresses as identification, the Lazarus hackers created Binance accounts and traded crypto stolen from Eterbase, the Slovakian exchange, according to account records that Binance shared with the police and that are reported here for the first time. There are some brokers that provide competitive Bitcoin binary options trading features that traders trust when they are trading. Now that the portals like NewsBTC are at disposal, the subscribers are able to make impeccable trading decisions. Sites like Hydra are only accessible on a clandestine part of the internet, known as the dark web, that requires a browser that hides a user’s identity. Any Dark Web Bitcoin mixer will have some information on you. Hillmann blamed a failure by law enforcement to submit a timely request via Binance’s web portal and then answer the exchange’s follow-up questions. German law enforcement had seized Hydra’s servers.