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This week Tigran Gambaryan the head of financial crime compliance for Binance, the worlds largest cryptocurrency exchange found himself in the last place hed ever expected to be: in a Nigerian courtroom pleading for bail.

A former investigator with the IRS, hed spent more than a decade following illicit cryptocurrency transactions back to the people who made them. Rolling up, among others, the alleged founder of AlphaBay, Alexandre Cazes, and Silk Roads Dread Pirate Roberts, Ross Ulbricht.

But now, after a spectacularly bad turn of events, Gambaryan has found himself at the center of a battle between his company and regulators of the Nigerian government. A Nigerian court has charged him personally for a roster of alleged crimes that Binance is accused of committing, and it is unclear how a middle manager, a former cop, has ended up shouldering the blame. Gambaryan has pleaded not guilty. He says hes done nothing wrong.

Even so, Nigerian authorities have held Gambaryan under guard since late February. Click Here spoke to more than a dozen current and former IRS and FBI agents who either knew Gambaryan well or had worked with him, and they all voiced the same concern: Why isnt the government doing more for one of its own?

Youre leaving a fellow law enforcement officer, even though hes out of the game, kind of hanging, said Matt Price, a former IRS agent who worked with Tigran on cases and at Binance. We cant believe theyre not doing anything. And while his plight appears to have been elevated inside the Biden administration in recent days, agents are asking what took them so long?

I have done nothing wrong, Gambaryan said in a cell phone video he filmed back in March. Ive been a cop my whole life. Im asking the United States government to assist me I need your help guys. I dont know if Ill get out of this without your help. Please help.

Gambaryans cell phone video summed in 40 seconds what is otherwise a very complicated series of events. Hello my name is Tigran Gambaryan and Im the head of financial crime compliance at Binance, it began. I have been detained by the Nigerian government for a month and I dont know what is going to happen to me after today.

While Gambaryan recorded the message, it was clear he was worried guards would stop him or grab his phone because just a few hours earlier he had awoken from a nap to learn that the Binance colleague who had been detained with him had somehow escaped. I had nothing to do with it, I was not involved in any of it, he said in the video.

Nadeem Anjarwalla was Binances regional manager in charge of Africa. He and Gambaryan were detained by the authorities at the same time. But the afternoon of that video, according to three people familiar with what happened, Gambaryan found a Post-it note from Anjarwalla that essentially said he was sorry, but he was making a break for it. Anjarwalla had put pillows under the covers of his bed so guards would think he was still there.

While it is unclear exactly how he got out of the government compound, it appears he asked guards if he could go to a nearby mosque to say prayers for Ramadan, and while he was in the mosque, he gave them the slip. It was left to Gamabaryan to break it to his captors that Anjarwalla was gone. The Nigerian government now claims that it is in negotiations with Kenya to have Anjarwalla extradited.

Their anger and embarrassment at having lost Binances country manager seems to have fallen mostly on Gambaryan. Within days of the escape, the Nigerian authorities charged him, Anjarwalla and Binance itself with tax evasion and money laundering.

The fact that Gambaryan found himself on the receiving end of all of this is particularly ironic because his job at Binance was to act as a liaison between law enforcement and the company and he came to Nigeria in the first place to teach local investigators how to track shady transactions back to the criminals behind them.

The timing of the Nigerian governments decision to detain Gambaryan and Anjarwalla in February came just months after the Justice Department reached a plea agreement with Binances founder and former CEO, Changpeng Zhao. Zhao had agreed to plead guilty to a roster of charges including tax evasion and money laundering related to lax oversight at the exchange.

Zhao, known as CZ, agreed to step down as CEO, surrender his passport and pay a multibillion-dollar fine. The announcement, rumored for months, rocked the crypto world and, some observers say, may have planted an idea into the minds of some Nigerian officials.

CZ was sort of a cult figure within the industry, said Jacob Silverman, who wrote a book with Ben McKenzie on the crypto industry entitled Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud.

He said that people had looked up to CZ because he had managed to build the biggest crypto exchange in the world at breakneck speed, though he had had a reputation for, you know, to use the old [Mark] Zuckerberg phase, move fast and break things.

Silverman said there was always a whiff of something being not-quite-on-the-up-and-up about Zhao. Among other things, he would never travel to the U.S. He lived in the United Arab Emirates, but he was from Canada.

People kept wondering, whats this guy up to in Dubai? Silverman said, adding that kind of mystery was rife in the early days of the industry. There was a sense that the existing rules, especially the existing rules around banking and how money moves shouldnt really apply. And thats certainly what animated a lot of the overseas growth of crypto, especially in East Asia and in Africa. There was this notion that we should be able to move money wherever we want to without really much heed for how were doing it or how much were sending or to whom.

In its case against Zhao, the Justice Department said the former CEO prioritized Binances growth, market share and profits over U.S. law. He admitted to facilitating billions of dollars in cryptocurrency transactions without adhering to some of the most fundamental rules of banking. Binance didnt implement anti-money laundering protocols or adhere to know your customer procedures, which require that a bank or financial institution should know basic information about their customers.

For several years after Binance first opened in 2017, you could register a Binance account with just an email address and a password, said Silverman. And CZ knew that they were flagrantly in violation of Know Your Customer and anti-money laundering laws and regulations. The Justice Department said as much when it charged Zhao, using internal texts and emails as proof that the attitude was do it now, and ask for forgiveness later.

In early January, just weeks after the Zhao plea agreement was made public, Gambaryan was part of a group of Binance employees who traveled to Abuja, the Nigerian capital, to meet with regulators from the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission.

It was more of a training event with the EFCC, this is something that Tigran did quite a bit, said Price. He did these trips a lot and I had done it quite a bit. You come in and talk to law enforcement people, it's usually a soft approach and you're trying to build relationships and trying to train them how to do crypto investigations.

So in other words, Gambaryan was there to teach the Nigerian regulators how to track cryptocurrency transactions back to the bad guys. But the January trip, the first of two Gambaryan would make in the first part of 2024, took a bad turn. Nigerian officials said they were concerned that Binance was evading taxes and violating anti-money laundering rules.

A Nigerian official allegedly took someone from the Binance team aside during the early January trip. The official said that regulatory authorities were planning an investigation of the company and that the cost of settling the companys legal problems would come to some $150 million. The authorities floated the idea of detaining some of the people in the delegation.

Obviously Tigran said, shit, I got to get out of here, said Price, adding that Gambaryan canceled his remaining appointments and hopped a plane back to the States.

Yuki Gambaryan, Tigrans wife, said she heard about it all in almost real time. He texted me, saying that, Hey, this is just a heads up, but things are not going well right now and we might get detained. So I was aware of it.

Then, just weeks later, Gambaryan got an invitation from the Nigerian government to meet with regulators again. Gambaryan told his friends that he felt he had an obligation to go. I asked his wife whether she was worried when he left for that second trip at the end of February.

I was. One hundred percent. Everybody was, she said.

Soon after officials detained Gambaryan and Anjarwalla, they asked Binance to turn over all the Nigerian transaction data they had. Local newspaper reports then said the government had limited the request to the top 100 users. Central bank officials then began accusing Binance of manipulating the exchange rate of the local currency, the naira, and said the company couldnt account for tens of billions of dollars in transactions.

All of which Binance has disputed.

The Justice Departments indictment against the former CEO of Binance showed Zhao and his lieutenants had a penchant for rule-breaking. You had, for example, employees of Binance joking about the price of an AK-47 and as if they knew about it in the context of a conversation of terrorist groups using Binance, said Silverman, the author of that book on cryptocurrencies. I think the company, at least at the top levels, definitely had a sense that some pretty bad people were using the platform.

Binance has been left to convince skeptics that they have changed. Richard Teng, the companys new CEO, is a former Singaporean regulator. He hired people like Gambaryan to help redeem the brand. Nigerian regulators are either unconvinced, or opportunistic. It is hard not to see echoes of the charges the Justice Department brought against Zhao in what Gambaryan is battling in Nigerian courts now.

Nigeria has the second largest cryptocurrency adoption rate in the world, after India. Its crypto transactions topped $56.7 billion last year, according to Chainalysis, a blockchain data platform.

We spoke to half a dozen people close to Tigrans case in both the U.S. and Nigeria and they say there may have been something else about the Zhao plea agreement that caught the eye of Nigerian officials. CZ agreed to pay a record $4.3 billion in fines and restitution to the U.S. government one of the biggest fines in corporate history.

Silverman said it sends another message. I think that indicates the gravity of the situation and maybe the amount of money sloshing around, he said.

It doesnt seem like a coincidence that days after Nigerian officials detained the two Binance executives in a government compound, they mused in the local press about potential billion-dollar fines.

Nigerias case against Gambaryan is about more than just trying to hold Binance and the cryptocurrency industry to account. There is a larger context: Nigeria is in the midst of a full-blown economic crisis.

The numbers tell the story. Inflation in Nigeria is now well over 30 percent. Food prices are up even more than that and the local currency, the naira, has declined in value against the U.S. dollar by some 40 percent since the beginning of the year. Just to keep up with inflation, Nigerians have started flocking to cryptocurrencies and trading stablecoins, which are pegged to the U.S. dollar amongst themselves, peer-to-peer.

Binance just facilitates those trades, it doesnt control them. But it has angered Nigerias central bank nevertheless. According to Feyi Fawehimni, a Nigerian scholar who has been writing about the nations economic and political affairs for more than a decade, it was easy to blame Binance for economic problems.

People who wanted simple answers simply turned on them and said, Oh, OK, this economy is struggling. Nobody has dollars, whos fault is this? he said. The dollar rate has jumped so significantly and the central bank had no control, so Binance became a kind of scapegoat.

Central bankers didnt want to blame the people trading naira, so they blamed the Binance platform instead. These are unpopular people, right? he said. Nobody likes Binance. The US government doesn't like them. The U.K. government doesn't like them. Everyone is suspicious of them as a crypto platform across the world so someone in the government made the calculation that if we go after these people, nobody's going to really fight for them.

And the calculation was right. Gambaryan has given critics of Binance a human shape, a shorthand not just for crypto and all the problems it has caused in Nigeria. They didnt have a former CEO to blame so they settled for a compliance officer.

Nearly all the current and former IRS agents we spoke to for this story said Nigeria wasnt alone in being unable to see the difference between Gambaryan and the company he worked for: the U.S. government seemed to be doing that too.

It wasnt until mid-March that the U.S. State Department seemed to focus on the case. Tigran's wife said he had six visits from embassy personnel in Abuja while he was being held in the government compound. And theyve visited him once since hed been moved to Kuje prison. They seem kind of out of touch to me, she said. They don't seem to understand our sense of urgency.

We spoke to four people at the State Department familiar with the case. They declined to be identified by name because they are not authorized to speak. But they claimed that the State Department didnt like to interfere with legal proceedings in other countries and quickly added that Binance wasnt just any company, before mentioning the Zhao plea agreement and the parade of cases against the industry more generally.

At the end of March, after Gambaryan had been in Nigerian detention for over a month, his case was flagged at the Justice Departments Office of International Affairs. Its part of the Criminal Division and is supposed to help the department sort through international criminal matters. It is unclear what the response to that query was.

But the rank-and-file agents we spoke to all agreed that the Gambaryan case was moving slowly. The thought is that if he was an ExxonMobil or Apple executive detained overseas, would the response have been quicker?

The only official email that we discovered that went out about Gambaryan among the rank and file came from a special agent in the Cyber Crimes Unit in D.C. It was sent to a small group of agents, nearly all of whom either knew Tigran well or had worked with him. Two people who had seen the email described its contents as mentioning that Tigran had been detained and that he would always be part of the law enforcement family. There was no mention of elevating this up the chain of command, but the email did suggest that everyone keep Yuki and Tigran in their thoughts and prayers.

I guess the best word for me would be, I think, it is sad, said John Baker, who was at the IRS with Tigran and retired from the government a couple of years ago, so was at liberty to say on the record what other agents told us privately. Originally I was thinking he's well known, so well regarded that somehow the United States would get involved to kind of figure out what's going on. He has friends in various agencies, including the FBI or the U.S. Attorney's Office. But it sounds like most people don't even know whats happened to him or haven't heard.

Go after the companies and the people making the decisions, he said. But when we're dealing with people who are, you know, middle management, employees, people who have no way to make a decision other than to receive a paycheck, that's crazy to me.

The CEO of Binance, Richard Teng, said on Bloomberg television last week that the company is talking to the Nigerian government to get Gambaryan back. Our key priority is to get Tigran home safely, right? he said on the sidelines of a cryptocurrency conference in Dubai. Tigran is a person of the highest integrity, people that know him know that he has devoted his entire lifetime previously with U.S. agencies. We are giving him and his family all the support needed and our key priority, our prayers, is to bring Tigran home safely as soon as possible.

So given all of this one could be forgiven for wondering why Gambaryan returned to Nigeria at the end of February after that earlier close call. Hindsight is always 20-20. But his friends say that when the Nigerian government invited him back for that fateful February meeting, Gambaryan thought he saw an opening to make things right.

Former IRS agent Price said that was just the way Gambaryan was. He believed he could solve it, he said. Knowing Tigrans personality, I certainly could see him believing he would be the only one that could fix it.

On Friday, Gambaryans tax trial was postponed until May 17. A bail hearing is supposed to resume April 23. Chengpeng Zhao, the former Binance CEO, is supposed to be sentenced on April 30th. He is facing up to 18 months in prison under federal sentencing guidelines, but prosecutors have said they may be asking for a stiffer sentence.

Excerpt from:

US glacial response to Nigeria's detention of former IRS crypto investigator rankles federal agents - The Record from Recorded Future News

This transcript was prepared by a transcription service. This version may not be in its final form and may be updated.

Ryan Knutson: Three weeks ago, a man named Nadeem Anjarwalla went to Nigeria. He works at the cryptocurrency trading platform, Binance, and he went there to meet with Nigerian government officials. Here's Anjarwalla's brother, Khalil Anjarwalla.

Khalil Anjarwalla: He had been a couple of times before and he had told me probably I think a few days before that he had a pretty important trip planned and he was heading up over the weekend.

Ryan Knutson: Anjarwalla works for Binance as the regional manager for Africa, and while traveling to Nigeria was a normal part of his job, this trip was an important one. Nigeria had accused Binance of manipulating the country's currency, something Binance denies. Anjarwalla was going to talk to government officials about the accusation and try to help calm things down.

Khalil Anjarwalla: He was only planning to be there for a day or two. He flew in on a Sunday. He had meetings on a Monday, and I think he was planning to fly out sometime on Tuesday.

Ryan Knutson: Can you describe the next time you spoke with him and what he said?

Khalil Anjarwalla: He did let me know that he was in Nigeria, that he reached safe, and then I didn't really hear from him through the course of the day. It was pretty late on the Monday evening when I think I was the first that he reached out to to say that the meetings didn't go well. He was currently being escorted to his hotel to check out and being taken to a secure compound.

Ryan Knutson: Nigerian officials took Anjarwalla to a guarded house where along with his colleague, he's been held in detention ever since. Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Ryan Knutson. It's Monday, March 18th. Coming up on the show, how two senior employees got caught in a fight between Binance and the Nigerian government. The tension between Binance and Nigeria has its roots a few years ago when lots of Nigerians started buying cryptocurrency. Now the country has the second largest cryptocurrency adoption in the world according to the data from Chainalysis. Nigerians buy cryptocurrency because it seems like a safe place to store their money. Nigeria's currency called the Naira has suffered cycles of high inflation and devaluation over the years. In January, inflation was up about 30% from a year ago. Here's our colleague, Caitlin Ostroff.

Caitlin Ostroff: I've talked to people in the past who have said that they view it as a better currency to have and transact in. If you think that the Naira might weaken, you would rather use something like Bitcoin, and I think that's different from how we think of it in the US, for example, where a lot of our thinking in our reporting certainly is that Bitcoin is kind of a speculative asset. Will it go up? Will it go down? But in less developed economies, you do see Bitcoin because even though the value fluctuates, it might be less volatile than some of the local currencies.

Ryan Knutson: How do people use their crypto accounts in Nigeria? Sort of like a savings account then almost?

Caitlin Ostroff: Yeah, a lot of people I've spoken to kind of use it as a savings account and they can say, my money is in either Bitcoin or in a dollar-pegged crypto, and I feel confident about it being safe there.

Ryan Knutson: Dollar-pegged cryptocurrencies, also known as stablecoins, are especially popular and many Nigerians have bought and sold their crypto on Binance. It's the largest cryptocurrency trading platform in the world.

Caitlin Ostroff: Binance is essentially a marketplace, so sometimes you'll have people switch out of a dollar-pegged cryptocurrency to go to the Naira because they need to pay their rent. In the same way that in the US you couldn't pay your rent in Bitcoin, you often can't do it in Nigeria too. And so Binance have said, we match buyers and sellers and they determine what the Naira is worth against these dollar-pegged cryptocurrencies. When someone needs Naira, someone else needs a dollar-pegged cryptocurrency, and it's just a matter of matching them.

Ryan Knutson: And so the place that many Nigerians go to trade their crypto for Naira is Binance.

Caitlin Ostroff: Yeah. So the idea is that Binance doesn't have a pool of Nigerian Naira that itself is sitting on and saying, we'll sell it to you for this price. What they're doing is what's called peer-to-peer trading. And that's basically like crypto jargon for saying, if Ryan wants to sell the Naira and Caitlin wants to buy it, we are going to match Caitlin and Ryan and they will determine what the price is going to be for that transaction. And so the market kind of gets made by people doing their own analysis and saying, what is this worth? And so that's kind of how Binance existed within this picture.

Ryan Knutson: For a few years, the Binance marketplace seemed to work well enough, but in 2023, as part of sweeping economic reforms, the Nigerian government ended the Naira's peg to the US dollar. The goal was to let the market play a bigger role in determining the Naira's value based on supply and demand, but it hasn't gone quite as the government had hoped.

Caitlin Ostroff: Earlier this year, the Nigerian Naira started to weaken considerably. For context, it's down about 40% this year so far. If you follow currency markets, that is a really strong price crash. 40%, especially in three months is a lot. And so kind of the bottom started falling out of the Naira. And one of the things that the government and currency traders that we've spoken to started to notice is that Binance kind of started to be used as the reference rate for what the Naira is worth.

Ryan Knutson: After the government de-pegged the Naira from the dollar two marketplaces started to emerge. There was the official marketplace at banks, and then there was the trading that was happening on Binance's platform and on Binance, the Naira was trading for much less. So when the Naira crashed, the Nigerian government started taking issue with Binance.

Caitlin Ostroff: In the course of this currency traders said they started to hear from people who were trying to buy the Naira, and while they would usually kind of cite the official rate, they started saying, "Well, why are you offering me this rate? Right. The rate on Binance is this." Usually Binance doesn't pop up as the proxy for what the Naira is worth. And so the government started to take notice of this and kind of blamed Binance for what they say is setting the rate of the Naira.

Ryan Knutson: But isn't that sort of what the Nigerian government said that they wanted, which is like, we're going to just let the marketplace determine how much this currency is worth. And Binance is just an exchange where people in the marketplace can buy and sell the currency to determine how much it's worth.

Caitlin Ostroff: And this is one of the more confusing aspects of the story, frankly, where officially that has been the government's line. At the same point, we spoke to currency traders who have said that even with that policy in place, the kind of unofficial stance that a lot of the local banks have taken is make sure that the currency kind of has a managed decline. Try not to let it fall too precipitously.

Ryan Knutson: So we want the market to decide, but we don't want it to crash super fast. We still want there to be a few breaks in that process.

Caitlin Ostroff: Yeah, it's confusing because it's not an official policy from the government. It's kind of this unspoken thing. Basically, it all boils down to what is the value of the Nigerian Naira. There's this struggle playing out between the Nigerian government and what they think the currency is worth and what the currency seems to have been worth on Binance's platform. And there's this disagreement about what role, if any, Binance had in causing the depreciation of the Naira.

Ryan Knutson: This is why Nigeria wanted to meet with those two Binance employees, Nadeem Anjarwalla and his colleague Tigran Gambaryan who's the head of financial crime compliance.

Caitlin Ostroff: They invited Binance to send employees to come to these meetings with officials from the Central Bank and the national security arm and the financial intelligence arm, and basically hash out all of these concerns that the government had.

Ryan Knutson: But for Binance, the meetings did not go well. That's after the break. Nadeem Anjarwalla is a British citizen who lives in Kenya with his family and Tigran Gambaryan is an American citizen who lives with his wife and two kids in Georgia. The last week of February, the two flew to Abuja, Nigeria's capital to meet with government officials.

Caitlin Ostroff: They thought this was going to be a short little trip. You go in on Sunday evening, you have a couple of meetings and you're out within a couple of days. They packed these small suitcases. They told their wives and their kids that they'd be back in a couple of days and they didn't really think it would be anything more.

Ryan Knutson: But they were wrong.

Caitlin Ostroff: Yeah, I mean, they get to their hotel Sunday night and they go to bed and they're like, in the morning we'll have all these meetings because we need to sort out this issue of why Nigeria thinks that we are to blame for the crash in the Naira. And so we're told by their families who kind of spoke to them after these meetings that first one was about two hours long, and it kind of had the feeling of progress being made. They sat down with everyone, they hash some things out, and they walked away feeling like that had been worthwhile and they had gotten somewhere, and then they were told, stay here. We want to have different people come for another meeting. And so they sat around for a bit and then they had the second meeting, and that one did not go as well. I mean, we don't know specifics, but the families have said that people were a lot more upset that whatever progress had been made in that first meeting, something happened. And so the two of them go back to their hotel and they are told, please pack your belongings. You are coming with us.

Ryan Knutson: From there, Anjarwalla and Gambaryan had their passports confiscated and were driven to a guarded compound where they were essentially put under house arrest.

Khalil Anjarwalla: The first few days was a lot of uncertainty, and Nadeem did not have his phone for various points through that.

Ryan Knutson: That's Anjarwalla's brother, Khalil again.

Khalil Anjarwalla: And he did let us know that the secure house that he was staying in, he had 24/4 guards monitoring him, that there were security cameras everywhere.

Ryan Knutson: Since then, Khalil says his brother has had more regular access to his phone.

Khalil Anjarwalla: We've had video conversations with him pretty much every day. I think he puts a brave front up, but it's very visible that he is under extreme amount of stress and strain. You can see it in his mannerisms, in his eyes.

Ryan Knutson: Khalil also says that their family's been in touch with the UK government in Binance to try to help bring him home.

Khalil Anjarwalla: It's his son's first birthday on the 21st of March. And so at the moment, we're really pushing to try and get Nadeem and his colleague out, particularly so he doesn't miss this incredible milestone. I'm a father of two sons and I just can't imagine how distressing it is to not be there for your son's first birthday.

Ryan Knutson: Binance says it's focused on getting its employees out. Here's our colleague, Caitlin again.

Caitlin Ostroff: They are trying to talk with the Nigerian government. They're talking, I think with governments for the country these two men are from, UK and the US and they're trying to sort this out, and so we've heard that that could include some sort of fine, although we don't know.

Ryan Knutson: Have these two Binance employees been charged with anything?

Caitlin Ostroff: No, and I mean that's another element of this, to what's confusing. So a Nigerian court allowed the detainment of them for two weeks, but there hasn't been any official charges. That two-week period is technically up. The Nigerian government has said there's some sort of investigation, but we don't know into what, and we've reached out to the Nigerian government and we haven't been able to find anything out or to get their side of what they think specifically these two men have done.

Ryan Knutson: Because neither Anjarwalla or Gambaryan have been charged with a crime, their lawyers argue they should be free to return home, but a Nigerian court said last week that the government can keep the men in custody until at least March 20th.

Caitlin Ostroff: For the families, the thing that I've heard repeatedly is that these might be senior employees, but these are not decision makers within Binance.

Ryan Knutson: When asked about why the Binance employees were being held, an advisor to Nigeria's president pointed to an article in the local press. The story said the government had asked the company to provide information about all of Binance's Nigerian users, and it alleged that the government had intelligence that there had been money laundering and terrorism financing on the platform. In a statement on its website, Binance said, "Complying with the applicable laws and regulations in the countries where we operate is a top priority." For Binance, this isn't the first time the company has sparred with a country's government. Last year, the US charged Binance with violating US anti-money laundering laws. Binance's founder and CEO pleaded guilty and stepped down, and the company was fined $4.3 billion. So what are the different ways that this situation might play out, do you think?

Caitlin Ostroff: I mean, best case scenario is the two men are released and they get to go back to their families. I think kind of more likely the expectation is there's going to have to be some sort of deal of some kind reach between Binance and Nigeria to get them released, but we don't really know. I think they could be charged with something. They could be sent to jail. Your guess is as good as mine.

Ryan Knutson: How has the crypto industry been reacting to the situation?

Caitlin Ostroff: I think they're all just a lot more nervous. The idea that two employees that certainly the company and their loved ones say are not decision makers here can be kind of taken and detained is really scary. And crypto companies have sometimes tenuous relationships with governments and being able to then have to try and extract these people from those countries is just a new layer of risk that I don't think was fully appreciated until now. And then on top of that, I think it's an escalation for how crypto companies operate in some of these markets where a lot of people in emerging markets do really like crypto because it's an alternative to their local currency, which can sometimes be flown to strong fluctuations or high inflation. And then on top of that, whether the locals will be able to continue with that and whether these companies will be able to continue to serve that is really up in the air because this is kind of a case we haven't seen before.

Ryan Knutson: That's all for today, Monday, March 18th. The Journal is a co-production of Spotify and The Wall Street Journal, additional reporting in this episode by Patricia Kowsmann and Alexandra Wexler. Thanks for listening. See you tomorrow.

Link:

How Two Binance Employees Ended Up Detained in Nigeria - The Journal. - WSJ Podcasts - The Wall Street Journal

BinanceCoin (BNB) has reignited its price surge this week after undergoing key technical tests. With Bitcoins stagnation above $66,000 contrasting with BNBs sudden spike above $500, the top exchange token looks poised to retest critical upper resistance levels soon.

After retracing last year,BNBspent considerable time centering around $300 support. However, this lateral price action has given way to a renewed uptrend recently.

Also read: Ethereum Foundation Under Investigation: How Will ETH Perform This Weekend?

Binance Coin is currently trading at approximately $573.57, which represents a 63% increase over the past 30 days. Technical indicators suggest the asset is in an overbought state. However, current market sentiment appears to favor a continuation of the upward trend over potential short-term pullbacks.

BNB has broken the key $500 psychological level recently. This could trigger FOMO and propel BNB towards retesting former all-time highs above $690.

Drawing insights from BNBs behavior at the beginning of 2024, cryptocurrency experts atChangellyhave offered their price projection for Binance Coin for the weekend.

Also read: Cryptocurrency: Top 3 Coins Under $1 To Buy Before Bitcoin Halving

During this period, it is anticipated that the coins price may reach an average of $541. Within the same period, the minimum expected price is $514, while the maximum price target is set at $568.

After concerns around the Binance exchange rocked investor confidence last year, BNB looks to have reawakened the strong fundamental narrative supporting it since its inception.

Having reclaimed its bullish momentum decisively this week, all eyes are now set on the next leap as Binance Coin surpassed the $500 level.CoinGeckodata shows that BNB is up by over 5% in the last 24 hours.

Also read: Shiba Inu Eyes $0.00003: How High Can SHIB Go This Weekend?

BNB coin is faring decently despite the regulatory clashes around Binance globally. The worlds largest cryptocurrency exchange is now facing scrutiny in Nigeria.

See the original post:

Binance Coin Weekend Price Prediction: Can BNB Hit $600? - Watcher Guru

16h30 3 min of reading by Fenelon L.

Binance Coin (BNB), the native token of crypto giant Binance, is on the verge of reaching new all-time highs. Lets dive into the main drivers propelling its massive adoption and growth potential.

The success of BNB is based on its increasingly diversified and growing utility within the Binance ecosystem. Initially created to offer discounts on trading fees, the token has expanded its scope of application.

BNB holders not only benefit from reduced fees but also attractive yields through staking, which can reach up to 6% per annum. This feature encourages users to HODL their tokens, thereby strengthening the supply and demand dynamics.

But BNBs utility doesnt stop there. It also serves as a governance token and gas on the Binance Smart Chain (BSC), an increasingly popular blockchain for the development of dApps. With billions of dollars in value locked in BSC protocols, BNB confirms its status as a pivotal asset.

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Beyond its flourishing utility, BNB benefits from another significant advantage: its deflationary economic model. Indeed, every quarter, Binance burns a portion of its BNB profits, which permanently reduces the circulating supply.

This practice, which has accelerated recently, exerts upward pressure on the tokens price. Simply put, a rarer supply against a growing demand can only propel prices upward. Thus, investors appreciate this approach that preserves the value of their holdings over the long term.

Moreover, its impossible to ignore the exceptional reputation that the Binance brand enjoys in the crypto universe. As the undisputed leader in terms of trading volumes, Binance inspires confidence and loyalty in its vast community.

Many see Binance as a key player in the democratization of cryptocurrencies and are eager to participate in its success by holding BNB. Thus, this emotional dimension, coupled with the solid fundamentals of the token, greatly contributes to stimulating speculative demand around BNB.

Driven by increasing utility, a deflationary tokenomics, and the strength of the Binance brand, BNB has all the assets to continue its ascent towards new heights. Its status as an essential token within an ever-expanding ecosystem makes it an asset of choice for investors looking to expose themselves to the future of decentralized finance.

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Passionn par le Bitcoin, j'aime explorer les mandres de la blockchain et des cryptos et je partage mes dcouvertes avec la communaut. Mon rve est de vivre dans un monde o la vie prive et la libert financire sont garanties pour tous, et je crois fermement que Bitcoin est l'outil qui peut rendre cela possible.

DISCLAIMER

The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed in this article belong solely to the author, and should not be taken as investment advice. Do your own research before taking any investment decisions.

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Binance Coin is soaring to its all-time high! - Cointribune EN

It doesnt appear that Tigran Gambaryan and Nadeem Anjarwalla will be free anytime soon.

The two senior Binance executives held in a Nigerian government guest house since they were arrested on February 28 are looking at another 16 days in detention following a court appearance Wednesday, according to people close to the case.

The Abuja Federal High Court ruled that it would hear preliminary arguments on the custody of both men on April 5.

The governments anti-corruption authority, which is spearheading a wide-ranging probe of Binances activities in Nigeria, is seeking a new two-week detention order for the pair.

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But the two executives, who had their passports confiscated and have been held under guard, have been detained without a court order since their first detention expired on March 12.

While its unclear precisely why the two Binance men are being detained, what is certain is that Gambaryan and Anjarwalla are now looking at spending more than a month in custody.

And they have not been charged with a crime.

Binance did not respond to requests for comment from DL News on Wednesday.

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A Binance spokesperson told DL News last week that the company is working with the authorities to resolve the matter and bring the two executives back home.

On Monday, the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, or EFCC, obtained a court order directing Binance to turn over user details of the estimated 13 million customers it serves in Nigeria.

The agency is probing whether Binance, which has not registered or licenced its operations in Africas largest nation, is facilitating unlawful currency market manipulation and the movement of illicit money, officials say.

Gambaryan is a US citizen and the head of the exchanges financial crime compliance department and a former senior agent at the US Internal Revenue Service.

Anjarwalla, a British citizen, is Binances Kenya-based manager. They both arrived in Nigeria to settle a regulatory dispute in connection with currency speculation with officials face to face.

That meeting ended without an agreement and the pair were immediately detained in a guest house run by Nigerias state security service.

Binance, meanwhile, has delisted Nigerias naira from its platform, forcing the countrys buoyant crypto crowd to use alternative avenues.

Osato Avan-Nomayo is DL News Nigeria-based DeFi correspondent. He covers DeFi and tech. To share tips or information about stories, please contact him at osato@dlnews.com.

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Binance execs to spend 16 more days in Nigerian custody without charges after court ruling - DLNews