Binance is once again fighting off regulators, claiming the Commodity Futures Trading Commission’s (CFTC) lawsuit is an overreach of U.S. law. The largest cryptocurrency exchange in the world says the agency is trying to regulate foreign individuals and corporations operating outside the US.
“U.S. law governs domestically but does not control the world. Congress did not make the CFTC the world’s derivatives police,” Binance said in an Illinois court filing on Monday as first spotted by Coindesk.
The CFTC sued Binance in March for offering unregistered crypto derivatives. Though the crypto exchange operates outside of the U.S., the CFTC says Binance, and its CEO Changpeng Zhao, directly target U.S. market participants, and must therefore play by the agency’s rules.
Binance called the CFTC lawsuit’s language “incendiary,” saying that its U.S. domestic business is handled by a separate entity, Binance.US, and the case should be dismissed. It says the CFTC’s attack on non-US defendants is “a Trojan horse in order to achieve worldwide regulatory reach—which would have consequences far beyond this case,” in the Monday filing.
However, Binance is facing regulation from more than one US regulator, including a lawsuit from the SEC and a Department of Justice probe.
Binance and the CFTC did not immediately respond to Gizmodo’s request for comment.
Binance’s latest pushback against U.S. regulation comes as the price of Bitcoin rises above $35,000, the highest price since May 2022, on the excitement that “crypto winter” is thawing. That price hasn’t been seen before the downfall of FTX, and it’s fueled by speculation that Grayscale’s Bitcoin ETF will soon be approved, opening the floodgates on safer ways to invest in cryptocurrency.
US regulators have come down hard on crypto’s largest players in the last year. FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried currently sits on trial for fraud with the DOJ. Genesis, Gemini, and the Winklevoss twins are also facing fraud allegations in a lawsuit from the New York Attorney General.