The cryptocurrency giant Binance has been granted a Digital Asset Service Provider (DASP) registration in France, according to an announcement by the company on Thursday.
The platform, as currently the world’s largest crypto-trading platform by daily volume, has been fighting for several months to set up a foothold in Europe. The approval was given by registration by the Autorité des marchés financiers (AMF) and the Autorité de Contrôle Prudentiel et de Résolution (ACPR), allowing Binance to formally operate in France.
The platform was founded by Chinese entrepreneur Changpeng Zhao (“CZ”) in 2017 and has rapidly grown into the leading crypto-exchange globally. The company had however needed to reallocate its headquarters to outside of China, due to a harsh regulatory crack-down on the cryptocurrency sector by Beijing in 2021. In the same year, Binance has also faced investigations and risk warnings issued by a number of financial market regulators in the U.S., Japan, UK and Germany, among other countries. After several setbacks, now France would be the first European market where Binance could legally operate.
The DASP regime was introduced in 2020 by French financial market watchdogs AMF and ACPR, as a mandatory procedure to regulate the domestic digital asset management industry. So far, there’s more than 30 crypto service providers registered as DASP in France, in order to legally operate in the country. As yet, however, there’s no DASP which has been fully licensed by the AMF.
Bitcoin, among other cryptocurrencies, has been taking a significant hair-cut since the beginning of this year, losing almost half of its value in comparison to the peak level in November last year. BTC has been currently traded at below the 3.000 USD mark.
