Binance Freezes Out MEXC Four Weeks Before U.S. Transfer Ban Applies

Binance announced Tuesday that it is refusing to move money to or from the crypto exchange MEXC and its affiliated companies. The notice came the same day the U.S. Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) order against MEXC Global was published in the Federal Register, which means U.S. financial institutions are not bound by the ban until Dec. 10.

Transfers out to any MEXC entity on Binance’s list will be refused. Funds arriving from them will be withheld pending a compliance check that could end with the user being removed from the platform.

Binance’s notice lists 13 names. One of them, MEXC (Comoros) Ltd, appears nowhere in FinCEN’s order, which never mentions Comoros, an Unchained comparison of the two documents found; the order says its reach is not limited to the entities it lists.

“Impacted funds and accounts may be temporarily restricted while the review is ongoing,” Binance wrote in an X post, adding that such activity “may constitute a breach of Binance Terms of Use.”

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The order invokes Section 9714 of the Combating Russian Money Laundering Act and bars covered U.S. financial institutions from “engaging in any transmittal of funds from or to MEXC Global,” with no end date. FinCEN, which issued the order on Nov. 6, said limiting only correspondent accounts (accounts foreign institutions keep at U.S. banks) would fall short, because funds can reach MEXC outside those banking ties.

FinCEN says MEXC Global moved $16.7 billion linked to Russian illicit finance, sanctions evasion, cybercrime and other illicit activity from May 2021 through May 2026; press releases from FinCEN and Treasury put the figure at no less than $16 billion. Treasury said nearly $1.5 billion of that total involved Russian sanctions evasion, and separately put MEXC Global’s direct business with more than 40 Iranian crypto exchangers at about $1 billion over the same period.

“Financial institutions cannot have it both ways: Either you support the Iranian regime, or you have access to the U.S. financial system,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said in the Treasury release. Treasury has previously named digital assets a sanctionable sector of Iran’s economy.

In a Nov. 7 post, Star Xu, founder of the crypto exchange OKX, asked users to avoid moving funds directly from MEXC to OKX, writing that “OKX treats FinCEN special measures with a level of caution similar to sanctions” and that OKX had already stepped up its controls “rather than waiting until the deadline.” Unchained found no formal halt from Bybit, Bitget, Coinbase, Kraken, KuCoin or Gate as of Tuesday.

MEXC CEO Vugar Usi said in a late-Monday X post that FinCEN had confirmed receipt of the company’s written request and that “deposits, withdrawals and trading are fully functioning.”

For scale, Binance reported about 106,210 bitcoin (BTC) in trading volume over the 24 hours to Tuesday afternoon, roughly 7.5 times MEXC’s 14,250 BTC, according to data from crypto tracker CoinGecko pulled by Unchained.

In October, South Korea’s financial regulator won approval to block MEXC, KuCoin and 25 other unregistered crypto sites.

Related Listen: How the $6B Binance Hack Ran Through Aave: Uneasy Money

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