The US Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) and the US Department of Justice (DoJ) recently filed charges against popular crypto derivatives platform BitMEX. According to the charges, BitMEX has not been following US anti-money laundering laws and has been facilitating related activity on its platform. In response, customers have withdrawn more than $336 million worth of Bitcoin from the derivatives exchange.
At first, traders withdrew a whopping 23,300 Bitcoins, worth more than $240 million from the platform. The first set of withdrawals began shortly after information about the charges came to light. The figure represented nearly 13% of all Bitcoins available on the derivatives platform. In a recent tweet, popular digital data analytics company Glassnode described it as “the largest hourly BTC outflow from BitMEX we’ve observed so far.”
After the first batch, a lot more customers continuously withdrew their funds from the company. Not long after, the total amount of Bitcoins withdrawn increased to 32,200 BTC following the third batch of withdrawals. This represents 19% of all Bitcoins on BitMEX.
Customers are reacting to the charges which name BitMEX CEO and owners, including Arthur Hayes, Samuel Reed, and Benjamin Delo.
In an official announcement, BitMEX said it disagrees with the US authorities’ ‘heavy-handed decision to bring these charges.’ It promised to ‘defend the allegations vigorously’.
Image Credits: Pixabay
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