Binance’s SAFU Insurance Fund currently holds 100 million USDT and 100 million TUSD, converted from stablecoin BUSD.
On the evening of March 17, cryptocurrency exchange Binance announced its latest move to reduce exposure to stablecoin BUSD, which carries the Binance brand but has been suppressed by US financial authorities.
Specifically, Binance said that it has converted all BUSD in the SAFU insurance fund into USDT and TUSD. Two addresses wallet BEP-20 and ERC-20 wallet provided by Binance shows that the exchange is holding 100 million USDT of BNB Chain version and 100 million TUSD of Ethereum version, respectively.
As Paxos will no longer be minting new BUSD, #Binance has swapped the BUSD in the SAFU Fund for TUSD & USDT.
This change will have no impact on users, and the funds remain on publicly verifiable addresses.
Funds are SAFU.https://t.co/edLVgpdCUQ
— Binance (@binance) March 17, 2023
In addition, Binance also owns 1.3 million BNB (worth $456 million) in the BEP-20 wallet and 16,277 BTC (worth $437 million) in the BEP-20 wallet. Bitcoin walletshowing that the total value of the SAFU insurance fund is $1.093 billion.
Wallet addresses associated with the SAFU fund are no longer holding any BUSD coins.
SAFU is an insurance fund for Binance users established by the exchange in 2019 after a 40 million USD Bitcoin hack. The fund is used by the world’s leading crypto trading platform to compensate for trading and technical problems, causing financial loss to customers. In February 2022, Binance said the value of the SAFU fund had reached the $1 billion mark.
This is Binance’s next notable move to separate itself from BUSD, the exchange’s branded stablecoin but was accused by the US SEC and New York state government in February. Stablecoin company Paxos, The issuer of BUSD, has been asked to stop creating new BUSD and only be allowed to convert the stablecoin back to USD from now until February 2024.
Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao also acknowledged the limitations imposed by US law, saying he was willing to give up BUSD.
Since then, Binance has canceled the automatic conversion of deposited stablecoins to BUSD, re-supported crypto trading pairs with USDC and TUSD, and announced the transfer of the 1 billion BUSD market relief fund into BTC, ETH and BNB.
In addition, as an alternative to BUSD, Binance is specifically promoting TUSD, the stablecoin rumored to be related to Justin Sun. Besides the moves to open TUSD trading pairs, exchange BUSD in SAFU fund to TUSD, the exchange was also found to issue a large amount of stablecoin TUSD and only maintain free Bitcoin trading for BTC/TUSD pair.
Binance’s preference for TUSD has helped increase the value of TRU, a cryptocurrency that has historically been tied to TUSD. However, the CEO of Binance CZ has denied the connection between the two at the moment, causing the TRU price to crash.
TRU should not be related to TUSD.
— CZ Binance (@cz_binance) March 15, 2023
BUSD’s market capitalization since mid-February has dropped by nearly 50%, from $16 billion to $8.5 billion at press time, while TUSD’s market cap has grown from $1 billion to 2.1 billion dollars in the same period.
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