Chief compliance officers from three top cryptocurrency exchanges said at an industry conference that their experiences with regulators that resulted in settlement agreements could help improve compliance programs within the wider industry, The Wall Street Journal reported.
Together, the three exchanges—Binance, Coinbase and Kraken—process tens of billions of dollars in daily trading volume, according to crypto price-tracking website CoinMarketCap. All reached settlements with U.S. regulators over the past two years.
Binance in November pleaded guilty and agreed to pay record fines totaling $4.3 billion to settle claims from multiple agencies that it violated U.S. anti-money-laundering laws and sanctions rules. Coinbase in January 2023 agreed to a $100 million settlement with the New York State Department of Financial Services over violations of anti-money-laundering law, which included $50 million intended to improve its compliance programs. In late 2022, Kraken agreed to pay more than $362,000 to settle allegations that it violated U.S. sanctions against Iran.
“In a sense, our settlement, with a massive fine and the requirements coming from that, probably is a model for others in the industry and will be an opportunity for us to continue to uplift the [compliance] program,” Noah Perlman, Binance’s chief compliance officer, said during a panel at blockchain analytics provider Chainalysis’s annual Links conference in New York.
Kraken Chief Compliance Officer CJ Rinaldi said one lesson his company has gained from the experience is to build trust with regulators by quickly identifying problems and then going directly to them with the issues found. “One of the important things to note is…[to] avoid surprises [with regulators],” he said.
Coinbase for the past few years has been focusing on clearing a substantial amount of compliance-related backlogs, said Valerie-Leila Jaber, the company’s global head of financial crime compliance.
“From my perspective, you’re never done with a compliance program,” she said.