Binance Holdings Ltd (幣安), the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, said Signature Bank will only handle user transactions of more than US$100,000 as the bank decreases its exposure to digital-asset markets.
“One of our fiat banking partners, Signature Bank, has advised that it will no longer support any of its crypto exchange customers with buying and selling amounts of less than 100,000 USD as of February 1, 2023. This is the case for all of their crypto exchange clients. As a result, some individual users may not be able to use SWIFT bank transfers to buy or sell crypto with/for USD for amounts less than 100,000 USD,” Binance said in a statement sent to Bloomberg News on Saturday.
No other banking partners are impacted, a Binance spokesperson said. SWIFT is a network used by financial institutions to transmit information and instructions.
Contagion fears in the digital assets market have reached traditional finance companies such as Signature and Silvergate Capital Corp, which saw its shares tumble as much as 40 percent after the bank disclosed its clients withdrew about US$8.1 billion of digital-asset deposits during the fourth quarter. Signature’s shares fell 64 percent last year.
Signature, which is based in New York, said last month that it intended to shed as much as US$10 billion in deposits from digital asset clients as it embarks on a widespread pullback from the cryptocurrency industry in the wake of the FTX blowup.
The shift comes after the US Federal Deposit Insurance Corp (FDIC) warned of crypto-asset risks.
The FDIC is the primary US federal regulator of banks that are chartered by the states that do not join the Federal Reserve System.
While banking organizations are neither prohibited nor discouraged from providing banking services to customers of any specific class or type, business models that are concentrated in crypto-asset-related activities or have concentrated exposures to the crypto-asset sector raise significant safety and soundness concerns, FDIC said in a statement on Jan. 5.
Binance said it is “actively working to find an alternative solution,” in the statement. And that “0.01 percent of our average monthly users are serviced by Signature Bank.”
South Korea would avoid capitalizing on China’s ban on a US chipmaker, seeing the move by Beijing as an attempt to drive a wedge between Seoul and Washington, a person familiar with the situation said. The South Korean government would not encourage its memorychip firms to grab market share in China lost by Micron Technology Inc, which has been barred for use in critical industries by Beijing on national security grounds, the person said. China is the biggest market for South Korea semiconductor firms Samsung Electronics Co and SK Hynix Inc and home to some of their factories. Their operations in China
GEOPOLITICAL RISKS: The company has a deep collaboration with TSMC, but it is also open to working with Samsung Electronics Co and Intel Corp, Nvidia’s CEO said Nvidia Corp, the world’s biggest artificial intelligence (AI) GPU supplier, yesterday said that it is diversifying its supply chain partners in order to enhance supply chain resilience amid geopolitical tensions. “All of our supply chain is designed for maximum diversity and redundancy so that we can have resilience. Our company is very big and so we have a lot of customers depending on us. And so our supply chain resilience is very important to us. We manufacture in as many places as we can,” Nvidia founder and chief executive officer Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) said in response to a reporter’s question in
DIVERSIFICATION: The chip designer expects new non-smartphone products to be available next year or in 2025 as it seeks new growth engines to broaden its portfolio MediaTek Inc (聯發科) yesterday said it expects non-mobile phone chips, such as automotive chips, to drive its growth beyond 2025, as it pursues diversification to create a more balanced portfolio. The Hsinchu-based chip designer said it has counted on smartphone chips, power management chips and chips for other applications to fuel its growth in the past few years, but it is developing new products to continue growing. “Our future growth drivers, of course, will be outside of smartphones,” MediaTek chairman Rick Tsai (蔡明介) told shareholders at the company’s annual general meeting in Hsinchu City. “As new products would be available next year
BIG MARKET: As growth in the number of devices and data traffic accelerates, it will not be possible to send everything to the cloud, a Qualcomm executive said Qualcomm Inc is betting the future of artificial intelligence (AI) will require more computing power than what the cloud alone can provide. The world’s largest maker of smartphone processors is transitioning from a communications company into an “intelligent edge computing” firm, Qualcomm senior vice president Alex Katouzian said. The edge in question is the mobile device that a user taps to access a network or service, and Katouzian used his time headlining one of the major keynote events at the Computex show in Taipei to make the case for how big a market that would be. The US company’s chips help smartphones harness