REGULATION | More P2P Platforms Suspend Ethiopian Birr Transactions Following Regulatory Pressure

Following the dramatic  and controversial suspension of Birr transactions on Binance P2P, other reputable exchanges have announced similar moves.

OKX announced that ETB (Ethiopian Birr) trading will no longer be available on the OKX P2P marketplace with the changes affecting these trading pairs:

• USDT / ETB
• ETH / ETB
• BTC / ETB
• USDC / ETB

according to OKX, this means:

• Existing ETB ds on the P2P marketplace will be taken offline
• Pending ETB orders on the P2P marketplace will remain until they’re either completed or canceled
• Users will no longer be able to post new ETB ads
• Buying and selling crypto with ETB on the P2P marketplace will no longer be supported.

Similarly, Bitget has announced that Bitget P2P will no longer support Ethiopian Birr (ETB) and the following trading pairs:

• USDT / ETB
• USDC / ETB
• BTC / ETB
• ETH / ETB
• BGB / ETB

The recent developments of Birr-paired P2P terminations come two months after the Bank of Ethiopia prohibited the activitiy calling it illegal. Some of the risks that bank listed included

• fraud
• the abscence of AML and CTF safeguards, and
• exposure to foreign exchange price manipulation

which explains removal of stablecoin pairs across the exchanges.

Interestingly, Larry Cooke, the Head of Legal, Binance Africa, pointed to similar concerns following engagements with Ethiopian regulators, saying:

“Just because something isn’t [specifically] regulated, doesn’t mean that there’s no ancillary regulation that applies. AML legislation will always apply, cutting across various sectors.

We’ve been having this conversation for a while and it’s not something that we were unaware of. Ethiopia is not the first market that has concerns around the stability of its currency.

We do understand is that the concerns of the regulators are around price discovery. People will go into our app and they would see what the Birr is being represented as because merchants are posting ads and saying that this is the rate compared to the dollar. And people will then use Binance as that point of price discovery. And that’s the concern that the regulator has. And we understand why.”

Similar concerns were raised by the Nigerian government two years ago in a case that implicated Binance. According to the regulator, Binance ws responsible for the country’s currency challenges resulting in economic losses amount to $81.5 billion.

The accusation was collaborated by the CEO of Binance who said:

“Binance’s P2P team engaged with the local community.

What we learned was that due to the lack of official reference FX prices in Nigeria, people in Nigeria, including crypto and non-crypto players, were using the price averages of the P2P advertisements as a source of FX rate reference.”

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