Bitfinex, the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, announced about its intention to stop servicing the US residents. The process will be phased in and will be completed in 90 days to cause as few inconveniences to users as possible.
As the Bitfinex statement says, the exchange considered the possibility of refusing to serve individual clients from the US some time ago and is now launching this procedure.
Making this decision, the exchange was guided by the following factors:
“Despite the fact that we were able to normalize banking services for a number of corporate and private users in certain jurisdictions, the development of regulated banking solutions for US citizens is still difficult;
Verified private users from the United States account form a very small percentage of our revenues, while an unjustifiably large portion of our resources are spent on servicing their needs, including support, legal and regulatory issues;
We expect that in the future the regulatory landscape will become even more complex.
Bitfinex is not based in the US. For the full-fledged servicing of private clients from the United States, exchanges located in the USA are better suited.”
At the initial stage, starting today, the exchange stops accepting new requests for verification from the US users. Maintenance of existing users from the United States will be terminated after 90 days.
In addition, in light of the recent report of the US Securities and Exchange Commission on the ICO, Bitfinex restricts the access of US users to trading by certain digital tokens. Restrictions apply to ERC20-tokens, which are used in the conduct of the ICO and take effect at 12:00 UTC on Wednesday, August 16. Restrictions on trading tokens EOS (EOS) and Santiment (SAN) take effect immediately.
The stock exchange has also added that it reserves the right to further policy changes depending on the circumstances.
Earlier this month, Bitfinex announced the creation of Ethfinex, a hybrid decentralized platform for trading tokens of the ERC20 standard
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