A day after the SEC filed 13 charges against Binance and CEO Changpeng Zhao, as well as BAM Trading and BAM Management, it has requested a temporary restraining order to freeze assets for all of the parties involved, according to a filing on Tuesday. The filing shows that the motion was granted.
The order is “necessary to preserve the status quo, ensure the safety and availability of those assets held and prevent dissipation or transfer of those assets from the jurisdiction of this Court,” the SEC stated in the case, which it filed with the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.
The request applies to BAM Trading and Bam Management — its staking-as-a-service program — and the Binance.US platform.
The respective parties have between five and 10 days to move the crypto assets involved in the restraining order to BAM. Within the next 30 days, the defendants have to transfer all customer crypto assets to “new wallets with new private keys, including new administrative keys.” The keys, along with the crypto assets and staking assets, will be in sole control of BAM Trading employees based in the U.S. and will “not be provided to or in any way shared” with Binance, Zhao or any Binance entity.
On a case-by-case basis, BAM Trading may transfer custody of customer crypto assets to third-party custodians like BitGo or Aegis, according to the filing.
Earlier this week, the SEC sued Binance and related parties; the suit touched on securities violations, including details on several crypto tokens that it considers to be securities, and how the Binance team worked to evade U.S. securities law and regulatory oversight.
Binance and BAM Trading were under Zhao’s leadership and control and operated without registering with the SEC, the agency alleges. “Zhao and Binance created BAM Management and BAM Trading in the United States and claimed publicly that these entities independently controlled the operation of the Binance.US platform.”
However, behind the scenes, according to the suit, Zhao and Binance were allegedly “intimately involved” in directing the trading entity’s business operations and providing crypto-related services to the Binance.US platform, which claims it’s an independent exchange.
Over the past 24 hours, Binance’s exchange saw a net daily outflow of $1.65 billion, or 2.57% of the $54 billion balance attributed to Binance on-chain, according to Nansen data.
The top cryptocurrencies are seemingly unaffected by the SEC news and have rebounded from the separate SEC suits against Binance and Coinbase over the past two days. The two largest cryptocurrencies by market capitalization, Bitcoin and Ether, rose 5.4% and 4%, respectively, during a 24-hour period, CoinMarketCap data showed. The global crypto market cap rose 3.81% to $1.13 trillion during the same time period.