One of the biggest cryptocurrency platforms in the world, Binance, has been under a lot of investigation since it was said to have taken cryptocurrency assets from Palestinian users. At the start of the trouble, Ray Youssef, CEO of Noones and co-founder of the peer-to-peer cryptocurrency platform Paxful, said that Binance had stopped Palestinian funds at the request of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF).
Youssef said on August 26 on social media that Binance had taken away all Palestinians’ money because Israeli officials told them to. He said that if nothing was done, this could happen to people in nearby countries like Syria and Lebanon as well.
If you ask Youssef, the order to freeze the accounts came from a letter signed by Paul Landes and sent from Israel’s National Bureau for Counter Terrorist Financing. The letter, which was written in Hebrew and dated November 2023, said that the seizure was legal because of Israel’s rules against terrorists. These laws give the Minister of Defense the power to briefly take assets, like cryptocurrency, that belong to terrorist groups that have been named.
The claims have caused a lot of debate, but Binance hasn’t said anything else about the people who were affected or what the funds were used for. Data shows that Palestine has only been responsible for 0.05% of Binance’s world traffic over the past year. But since August 2023, traffic from Palestine on the site has grown by over 80%, showing that people in the area are becoming more interested.
