Binance published a blog last week that debunked the often-publicized myth about cryptocurrencies, which is a “paradise” for illegal money laundering. Sadly, our industry must respond to these questions over and over again as stakeholders continue to spread disinformation, or deliberately ignore important context of events to mislead the public, such as the crypto industry being more effective at uncovering illicit activity than the traditional banking system.

Sadly, we’ve seen these types of misleading articles sometimes affect more well-known media outlets. An author who has published many extreme articles, published another article today. As in his last article, the multiple third parties mentioned in the core of their article have conducted rigorous fact-checking, and his latest article is full of lies, a lot of jumping to conclusions, and citing bad data, which could have been fact-checked by major on-chain analytics firms like Chainalysis or TRM.

We strongly recommend that you ignore authors and experts who only pick data that works in their favor, rely on “leaks” from regulators that cannot be easily verified, and fuel paranoid delusions about cryptocurrencies in pursuit of personal reputation or financial gain. Instead, we just look at the fact that neither the industry nor Binance is perfect, but they have grown rapidly over the past four years. Cryptocurrencies are an entirely new innovation, and like many regulators and policymakers, Binance is still figuring out what an appropriate regulatory framework should look like.

According to Chainalysis, a blockchain analytics firm specializing in cryptocurrency and blockchain analysis, only 0.15% of all transactions using cryptocurrencies in 2021 will be related to illicit activity. According to previous information from the United Nations, 2% to 5% of traditional fiat currency (cash), about 800 billion to 2 trillion US dollars in current US dollars, is related to illegal activities. The comparison shows that cryptocurrencies are less involved in illegal activities than traditional cash, and cryptocurrencies and blockchain are well documented.

So, are such allegations of money laundering against Binance really convincing?

We do not wish to continue arguing about anything here, there is a post with the full communication between Binance’s emails and Reuters. It is important to note that we recommend that they interview the two senior investigators who led the casework and brought down Hydra and Lazarus, and that they can review the UID and wallet information on which they claim their report is based. They all refused.