- Bittrex shuts down its operations in the U.S. due to the “Regulatory Environment”.
- Bittrex co-founder and CEO Richie Lai announced through Twitter about shutting down of the company.
Bittrex has announced the shutting down of its operations in the U.S. Bittrex is an American cryptocurrency exchange. The company was founded by three amazon alumni in 2014. The company is winding up operations on “Regulatory Environment” grounds.
Why Bittrex Shuts Down its Operations?
The co-founder and CEO of the company tweeted saying that “it was not “economically viable” to continue to run the exchange in the “current U.S. regulatory and economic environment.” Richie Lai further added, “Regulatory requirements are often unclear and enforced without appropriate discussion or input, resulting in an uneven competitive landscape,” he said.
It is another company to wind up operations from the country after Nexo in December. It was in last October that Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control and Financial Crime Enforcement Network charged Bittrex Global with a fine of $53 million for preventing customers from using its platform from countries like Cuba, Iran, and other sanctioned nations.
The company is the 71st largest digital asset exchange having a volume of just $11.7 million as per CoinGecko was also going to be ceased in 2019 for not being able to detect money laundering and comply with sanctions.
Despite all this Bittrex’s Lai said that Bittrex has never lost funds or been hacked in the tweet published on Friday. According to CoinGecko the trading volume of Bittrex in the last 24 hours is about $17 million while that of Coinbase Global Inc. is at $1.4 billion.
