Reported by Emily Flitter and Matthew Goldstein

Binance, the giant cryptocurrency exchange accused of mishandling customer funds, used two American banks to move billions of dollars around the world, the Securities and Exchange Commission said on Wednesday, detailing how huge sums of cash flowed in and out of the accounts sometimes within a span of days.

In court filings, the S.E.C. accountant, Sachin Verma, detailed a tangle of transactions that companies associated with the giant cryptocurrency exchange had made through two banks: Silvergate Bank and Signature Bank, both of which failed this year. The filing showed that Binance officials, including the company’s founder and chief executive Changpeng Zhao, moved hundreds of millions and in some cases billions of dollars through the regional banks to accounts associated with companies in places like Kazakhstan, Lithuania and the Seychelles.

In one instance, in February 2022, the filings said, $20 million flowed into one of Binance’s Silvergate accounts and $19.9 million flowed out of it, all within the span of a few days, leaving the account with a starting balance of $7.6 million at the beginning of the month and $7.7 million at the month’s end.

A Binance account at Signature reported $1 billion in deposits and $1.3 billion in withdrawals all in the same month, according to the filings. The outgoing money went to Merit Peak, the company that Mr. Zhao controlled where the S.E.C. alleges customer funds were secretly commingled.

Read full report: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/07/business/binance-cash-bank-accounts.html