Cryptocurrency exchange Binance will devote $1 billion in initial commitments to the industry recovery fund and may increase that amount to $2 billion, the company announced.
In a blogpost Binance said it has also received $50 million in commitments from crypto firms Jump Crypto, Polygon Ventures, and Animoca Brands.
“We do this transparently,” Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao said.
The fund is an attempt by Binance to support the crypto industry after Sam Bankman-Fried’s exchange FTX filed for bankruptcy earlier this month. Around 150 companies have already applied for support from the fund, Binance said.
In the first court hearing for the bankruptcy case on Tuesday, a lawyer for the company said the FTX was run as the “personal fiefdom” of Bankman-Fried.
FTX’s controversial crash raised the urgency into regulating the crypto sector. Watchdog IOSCO said that targeting such “conglomerate” platforms will be their focus for 2023.
“The sense of urgency was not the same even two or three years ago. There are some dissenting opinions about whether crypto is a real issue at the international level because some people think that it’s still not a material issue and risk,” the new chair of IOSCO Jean-Paul Servais said to Reuters.
Servais warned of raising conflicts of interest in the industry, given that “crypto conglomerates” like FTX offer multiple services, such as brokerage, custody, proprietary trading and issuance of tokens.
