By The biggest cryptocurrency exchange in India, WazirX, has done what Binance did and taken off the market three stablecoins and “automatically converted” user balances to BUSD.
The largest cryptocurrency exchange in India, WazirX, announced today that it would remove USD Coin (USDC), Pax Dollar (USDP), and TrueUSD (TUSD) from its list and automatically convert users’ balances in these three stablecoins to BUSD, which was created by Binance.
“WazirX has stopped accepting deposits of USDC, USDP, and TUSD, and we won’t accept any more,” the exchange said in a statement on Monday. “WazirX will implement BUSD Auto-Conversion for users’ existing balances of USDC, USDP, and TUSD stablecoins at a 1:1 ratio to improve liquidity and capital efficiency for users.”
The exchange said that it will stop letting people withdraw USDC, USDP, and TUSD after 5 PM IST on September 23. Then, on September 26, it will take down the spot market pairs for all three stablecoins.
WazirX said that the automatic conversion of users’ existing USDC, USDP, and TUSD balances will be finished “on or before October 5th.”
WazirX follows Binance by taking USDC off its list.
The news from today comes two weeks after Binance did something similar. In its announcement that it was taking USDC and two other stablecoins off its list, Binance used similar language. The exchange said that the move was made to “improve liquidity and capital efficiency for users” and that it reserved the right to “change the list of stablecoins that can be automatically converted.”
It also comes after Binance recently denied that it owned WazirX, even though it said the exact opposite in 2019.
Changpeng “CZ” Zhao, the founder of Binance, took to Twitter at the beginning of August to talk about the 2019 news that Binance had bought WazirX in a deal worth up to $10 million. He said that “this transaction was never completed.”
Nischal Shetty, a co-founder of WazirX, criticised Zhao’s comments by saying that he and other co-founders own Zanmai Labs, which has a licence from Binance to operate INR-crypto pairs on WazirX.
Shetty says that Binance runs WazirX’s crypto-to-crypto pairs and handles crypto withdrawals. He also says that Binance “owns WazirX as a product and a brand.”
Decrypt tried to get in touch with both Binance and WazirX, but had not heard back by the time this article was published.
Zhao denied the deal after India’s top financial enforcement agency, the Enforcement Directorate (ED), said that WazirX had broken currency exchange rules and that $8.14 million of the company’s assets had been frozen.
Last week, WazirX said that its bank accounts were unfrozen because it had “actively cooperated” with the ED through anti-money laundering (AML) checks, which led to the blocking of the accounts of 16 fintech companies that used WazirX to send crypto assets to “unknown foreign wallets.”
