Cryptocurrency exchange Binance announced that users can no longer purchase digital tokens linked to stocks on its platform.
“Effective immediately, stock tokens are unavailable for purchase on Binance.com,” the exchange said on its website. It also added that it would cease all support for them by October 14.
The announcement explained that users who currently held stock tokens could sell or hold them over the next 90 days. However, they will not be about to manually sell or close their positions after October 14. At that point, all stock token positions on Binance.com will be closed out based on actual executed prices after the market opens on October 15.
Binance crackdown
This news came just a day after Italian regulators joined the retinue of those cracking down on the platform. The Commissione Nazionale per le Società e la Borsa (Consob) told Binance that they are not authorized to carry out activities in Italy. This news comes recently after the UK’s own financial watchdog shut the door on Binance’s activities within its own country.
Binance launched its first stock token with Tesla in April. This was followed by stock tokens for Apple, Microsoft and Tesla. However, shortly after launching the stock tokens, Binance came under the eye of Germany’s financial regulator BaFin. They were considering whether these offerings were securities, in which case they were lacking a prospectus. It is largely this initial scrutiny that triggered that which followed.
Future of stock tokens
The announcement listed no official reason for ceasing its stock token offerings, other than “to shift our commercial focus to other product offerings.” Although this experiment with tokenized assets failed to pan out, other projects involving stock tokens are still underway.
Binance was able to offer its stock tokens through Swiss digital asset provider Digital Assets AG. Digital Assets recently announced that it had started offering tokenized stocks on the Solana Blockchain. Whereas Binance stock tokens were limited to being traded on Binance, Digital Assets’ stock token offering on Solano will be available to trade across its ecosystem.
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