Binance in talks for Malaysian licence after five-year absence

Saturday 31 Oct 2026

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(Oct 31): Binance said it’s in discussions with Malaysian regulators for a licensed business in the country, as the cryptocurrency exchange seeks a route back into a market where authorities have blocked its website and applications.

“We have been jointly engaging the Securities Commission Malaysia (SC) and Bank Negara Malaysia over the last 10 months, on a licensed pathway to offering our products and services into Malaysia,” a Binance spokesperson said in a statement to Bloomberg on Saturday.

The world’s largest crypto exchange is in talks on the “viability and structure of licensed business model in Malaysia”, the spokesperson added, declining to give further details on the type of licence it is seeking.

Regulatory approval would provide Binance a route to formally re-enter a market where it has faced restrictions for more than five years. The SC ordered Binance in July 2021 to cease operating in Malaysia after the regulator found it was then illegally running a digital asset exchange. The orders included stopping all media and marketing activities, and restricting Malaysian investors from accessing Binance’s Telegram group.

While the SC had removed Binance from its Investor Alert List in 2024, it added the exchange back to the list earlier this month without providing a reason.

Binance this week suffered a security breach involving as much as US$6.3 billion (RM25.6 billion), the largest known crypto hack. It suspended withdrawals and pledged to cover all losses. While the full details of the Binance breach have yet to emerge, the incident comes amid growing concern about the risks posed by hackers in the age of artificial intelligence.

Malaysian lawmaker Lim Guan Eng wrote to the SC in September, asking the regulator to probe if Binance’s peer-to-peer (P2P) platform is facilitating ringgit transactions through advertisements listed under another currency denomination. His office distributed the letter on Saturday “in light of the recent Binance security incident”.

In response, Binance said it had voluntarily disabled a specific Papua New Guinea kina marketplace on its P2P platform that was unofficially pegged to the ringgit, as part of its engagement with the SC. It said the latest complaint concerned an isolated advertisement by a non-Malaysian user on the Romanian leu marketplace, adding that no other products on its platform were pegged to or substitutes for the ringgit.

“No platform, business or control mechanism can fully prevent bad actors determined to circumvent the rules of a marketplace,” the Binance spokesperson said. “We take this seriously, but we do not believe an isolated case like this reflects any sustained effort to circumvent Malaysian law.”

Binance said it remains committed to working with the country’s regulators to bring its services to Malaysians in a compliant manner.

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