The Philippine Securities and Exchange Commission has released an advisory that Binance doesn’t have the authority to sell or offer securities to the public in the Philippines.
The advisory came out on November 28, 2023, but was issued to the public a day after.
What does the advisory mean?
The SEC requires Binance to register with the Philippine Securities and Exchange Commission before it can engage in the business of buying and selling securities to those living in the country. They gave Binance 3 months from November 29, 2023, to do so. If Binance fails to comply within that period, it will be “banned” in the country by February 29, 2024.
How is Binance going to be banned in the Philippines?
Since Binance doesn’t have any offices in the Philippines, there’s no way for the SEC to sanction them directly.
So how will they “ban” Binance?
What the SEC can do are the following:
- Mandate local ISPs to block Binance
- Require social media outlets and advertisers that are registered in the Philippines to stop advertising Binance
- Impose a fine on those who promote Binance locally.
The third bullet was highlighted in their advisory wherein those who endorse Binance will be met with a fine of a whopping 5M pesos and/or imprisonment of 21 years.
So what should you do?
If you have cryptocurrencies sitting in Binance, you can either do a “wait-and-see” mode (risky move) or do the following:
- transfer your assets to a cold storage
- transfer to a local crypto exchange
- withdraw completely in the form of cash
And if you are an endorser, or influencer or have been promoting Binance, you should consider removing promotional posts and your affiliate links in the meantime.
Kuro-kuro ni Kuya Well
Let’s face it: the SEC can not compel Binance to register in the Philippines. So the question now lies as to whether the trading volume from the Philippines is big enough for Binance to consider registering its business in the country.
But can the SEC really ban Binance? At the most, they might be able to get the ISPs to cooperate. Should that happen, those in the Philippines will get denied access to the Binance website and app. That said, this can be circumvented by the use of a VPN service.
I guess the one big factor that could deter Filipinos from using Binance is if P2P will be removed from the platform. And only Binance can do that.