Binance said in a tweet on Monday it would swap 750 million tether-tron token pairs for tether-ether in an attempt to maintain the stablecoin‘s liquidity.
The move comes amid renewed regulatory scrutiny at the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange and will help cushion some of the fallout from recent blows, including Binance being sued by the US Securities and Exchange Commission.
The swap, set to start after 12 pm UTC (05:30 pm IST) on Monday, will be held directly with the tether team, the tweet said.
Tether is the largest stablecoin that aims to maintain a 1:1 peg with the US dollar. Tron is the ninth largest cryptocurrency with a $6.3 billion (nearly Rs. 51,900 crore) market value, while ether is the largest after bitcoin, with its $210 billion (nearly Rs. 17,30,500 crore) market capitalization.
Last week, the SEC sued Binance, its CEO and founder Changpeng Zhao, and Binance.US’s operation alleging in 13 charges that Binance had engaged in a “web of deception,” artificially inflated trading volumes and diverted customer funds, and that Binance and Zhao were secretly controlling the U.S. entity while publicly claiming that it was independent.
It will also halt dollar withdrawal channels as early as June 13 after the SEC asked a court to freeze its assets. Binance said on Thursday.
Trading platform Robinhood Markets said the next day that it was delisting three cryptocurrency tokens from its platform that the SEC identified as securities in its lawsuit against Binance.
The SEC charged the Tron Foundation and its founder Justin Sun with fraud in March. A month later the US arm of Binance said it would remove digital asset token tron from its trading platform.
© Thomson Reuters 2023