Binance Australia has been facing a cut-off from a key local on-ramp service, as traders were observed to be trading Bitcoin (BTC) and other cryptocurrencies at a discount on the platform. As of May 30, Bitcoin traded at about A$34,863 ($22,589) on Binance Australia, which was about A$7,516 lower than the average price on platforms such as Independent Reserve and CoinJar, according to CryptoCompare data. Discounts of around 20% were also visible for coins such as Ether and Solana.
Experts believe that the reason for this significant discount is the looming deadline for the cessation of Binance Australia’s connection to the Australian PayID service. “Bitcoin/AUD is trading at a material discount to Bitcoin/USD as Australian clients are willing to sell Bitcoin at a discount so they can withdraw the AUD before the deadline,” commented Richard Galvin, co-founder at fund manager Digital Asset Capital Management.
Starting from June 1 at 5 pm AEST, Binance Australia’s users will no longer be able to withdraw Australian dollars to their bank accounts using the popular PayID service. Earlier in May, the platform was also deprived of access to some AUD deposit services. Binance Australia stated that AUD balances can be converted into the Tether stablecoin to “facilitate withdrawals and trading activities” after June 1.
However, the platform still offers some alternatives for customers to deposit onto the exchange. “We are working hard to find an alternative provider to continue offering AUD deposits and withdrawals to our users,” they said in a statement.
It is worth noting that Binance Australia has been facing difficulties with several financial services providers in the past few weeks. On May 18, the platform announced it could no longer offer Australian dollar deposit services as a result of a decision taken by Cuscal, a payment solutions provider. Cuscal commented that their primary goal is to protect Australians from financial crimes and scams.
Following this, one of Australia’s largest financial institutions, Westpac Banking Corp., revealed on May 18 that it had started testing new customer protections for some cryptocurrency payments to reduce scam losses. Additionally, a Twitter storm erupted with customers requesting Binance Australia to enable transactions via PayID, a service accepted by over 100 banks and financial organizations in the country.
Unfortunately, Binance Australia had to inform its users that they could no longer facilitate PayID AUD deposits due to a decision made by their third-party payment service provider.
Source: Cryptonews
