Binance freezes withdrawals of stablecoin USDC as investors pull $2B
&gt; The world&#x27;s biggest crypto exchange will freeze all withdrawals of USD Coin while it conducts a &quot;token swap&quot; to boost its holdings of the dollar-pegged cryptocurrency, the crypto group&#x27;s CEO Changpeng Zhao said Tuesday<p>It&#x27;s worth noting that USDC is not even a token controlled by Binance. It&#x27;s controlled and issued by Circle. So effectively, Binance is refusing to honor its commitment to depositors to give them their money on demand.<p>That&#x27;s called a &quot;default.&quot;<p>Why? The article says something about a key bank being closed. Nonsense. Is the USDC held at that bank? No. Binance is allegedly holding it. Only clearly they&#x27;re not because they can&#x27;t produce it on demand.<p>I&#x27;m frankly amazed that people with the ability to understand this alphabet soup mumbo jumbo keep falling for the same scam over and over again. Underneath all of the slick marketing and nerd posturing is a simple truth: these are all fractional reserve systems. Conceptually, they are no different than banks or pyramid schemes.<p>The only possible reason you want a stable coin, rather than dollars, in the first place is because you&#x27;re doing something that requires you to route around US financial regulation.<p>The US dollar is digital. It moves around the world using a digital network. It&#x27;s traded the world over by almost every country whether they want to or not. You can buy almost anything there is to buy with US dollars.<p>You &quot;need&quot; a stable coin because you&#x27;re trying to have your cake and eat it too: US dollar-like liquidity and value preservation without US dollar financial regulation.