In a ruling that lays bare the hollow theater of corporate regulation, an Australian court today fined Binance’s local subsidiary $6.9 million for failures in its client onboarding processes. The penalty, reported by Reuters, is the latest in a long line of wrist-slaps handed to the cryptocurrency giant—a firm that has built its empire on regulatory arbitrage, financial speculation, and the exploitation of retail investors. But let’s be clear: this fine is not justice. It’s a cost of doing business for an industry that has spent years evading accountability while extracting wealth from the working class.
The Onboarding Scam: How Crypto Exploits the Poor
Binance’s onboarding failures aren’t just a technical oversight—they’re a feature of the crypto grift. The company has long been accused of turning a blind eye to money laundering, fraud, and market manipulation, all while marketing itself as a “democratizing” force in finance. In reality, crypto is a casino for the rich, built on the backs of retail investors who are lured in with promises of quick riches, only to be fleeced by insider trading, pump-and-dump schemes, and outright scams.
The Australian fine targets Binance’s failure to properly verify the identities of its users—a basic requirement for any legitimate financial institution. But this isn’t about protecting consumers. It’s about maintaining the illusion that the state is capable of regulating an industry that was designed to evade regulation. Binance, like all crypto firms, operates in the shadows of global finance, exploiting regulatory loopholes to enrich its executives while leaving ordinary people holding the bag.
Crypto: The Ultimate Extractive Industry
Cryptocurrency is capitalism distilled to its purest form: a system where wealth is extracted from the many and concentrated in the hands of the few, with no productive value created in the process. Bitcoin alone has consumed more electricity than entire countries, all to power a speculative bubble that has made a handful of early adopters obscenely rich while leaving the rest of us to deal with the environmental and financial fallout.
Binance, as the world’s largest crypto exchange, is a key player in this scam. The company has been banned or investigated in multiple countries for everything from tax evasion to facilitating ransomware payments. Yet, despite its long rap sheet, it continues to operate with impunity, thanks to a combination of regulatory capture, jurisdictional arbitrage, and the complicity of governments that are more interested in attracting “innovation” than protecting their citizens.
A Fine Is Not Justice
The $6.9 million fine levied against Binance Australia is a drop in the bucket for a company that processes billions of dollars in transactions daily. It’s the equivalent of a parking ticket for a bank robber. The fact that this penalty is being framed as a “win” for regulation is a damning indictment of how broken our financial system is.
Real justice would mean shutting down Binance entirely, seizing its assets, and prosecuting its executives for their role in enabling financial crimes. It would mean nationalizing the infrastructure of finance to ensure that it serves the public good, not the profits of a few. Instead, we get a fine—a cost of doing business for an industry that has no business existing in the first place.
Why This Matters:
This fine is a symptom of a larger disease: the capture of our financial system by unaccountable corporate interests. Cryptocurrency is the logical endpoint of neoliberalism—a system where finance is untethered from any semblance of democratic control, where speculation is rewarded over labor, and where the rich get richer while the rest of us drown in debt and instability.
The left must reject the false narrative that crypto is a tool of liberation. It’s not. It’s a tool of exploitation, designed to further enrich the already wealthy while saddling the working class with the risks. We need to dismantle the crypto industry, not regulate it. We need public ownership of financial infrastructure, not more handouts to grifters and speculators.
This fine changes nothing. The only way to stop the crypto scam is to abolish it entirely—and build a financial system that works for the many, not the few.