The future of the BUSD stablecoin looks increasingly uncertain amid mounting pressure from U.S. regulators.
According to a Wednesday report from the Financial Times, BUSD has seen over $6 billion worth of outflows in the last month, after its issuer Paxos was ordered to stop minting the token and severed ties with Binance.
“This will probably hurt Binance’s bottom line as BUSD is a significant part of the business,” said Ilan Solot, co-head of digital assets at Marex Solutions, to FT.
It’s been around two weeks since the New York State Department of Financial Services (NYDFS) issued its notice to Paxos, shortly after which the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) launched an investigation into the stablecoin issuer.
Since then, investor confidence in the Binance-branded stablecoin has fallen sharply, even more so after Coinbase said it would suspend BUSD trading entirely later this month.
At the time, Coinbase attributed the decision to BUSD’s failure to meet listing standards. The crypto exchange’s CEO Brian Armstrong elaborated on this in an interview with Bloomberg TV on Wednesday.
“The reason we did that was that Paxos, the issuer of BUSD, had been ordered to stop minting it, so we were concerned about liquidity issues for our customers,” said Armstrong.
Although liquidity concerns around BUSD are entirely plausible, especially given the nature of outflows over the last few weeks, some market analysts aren’t buying into the fact that this is the case – at least, not yet.
#BUSD market depth on Coinbase wasn't actually impacted by the Paxos announcement and trade volume is about the same as it was in January.
So probably a preemptive measure, not tied to immediate liquidity issues. pic.twitter.com/pyh41edCoF
— Clara Medalie (@Clara_Medalie) March 1, 2023
According to Clara Medalie, Kaiko’s director of research, Coinbase’s move was more of a preemptive measure, considering BUSD’s liquidity on the exchange has remained relatively unchanged.