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Uzbekistan’s National Agency for Prospective Projects has fined the international cryptocurrency exchange Binance 300 base calculation amounts — equivalent to roughly 102 million soums — for operating in the country without the required licence, citing a string of regulatory and anti-money-laundering violations.
The agency found that Binance had not taken the steps necessary to establish a lawful presence in Uzbekistan, including obtaining a crypto-asset service provider’s licence. Under legislation that took effect on 1 January 2023, citizens and legal entities in Uzbekistan may buy, sell or exchange cryptocurrency only through nationally licensed providers operating under procedures set by domestic law — a framework Binance had not complied with.
A Catalogue of Violations
Beyond the absent licence, regulators identified several additional breaches. Transactions on the Binance platform were found to have involved anonymous crypto-assets, as well as crypto-assets and funds alleged to have been obtained through criminal means, including theft and fraud. The company holds no charter capital with a portion deposited in a Uzbek commercial bank, as required, and runs no electronic platform on servers located within Uzbekistan’s territory. Regulators also concluded that Binance had failed to observe Uzbek legislation governing crypto-asset circulation, anti-money-laundering rules, counter-terrorism financing requirements, restrictions on financing the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, and personal data storage and use obligations.
The agency drew up a compliance report detailing the violations and forwarded it to Binance for review, requiring the exchange to take measures to remedy the breaches.
Why It Matters
The action signals that Uzbekistan’s regulatory framework for digital assets — still relatively new — is being actively enforced against major international platforms, not merely domestic actors. The 2023 rule confining crypto transactions to licensed national providers was a deliberate effort to bring the sector under state oversight, and the Binance case is a public test of that policy’s reach. The fine itself is modest by global standards, but the compliance report and the formal listing of anti-money-laundering failures carry reputational and legal weight that could complicate Binance’s position in the Central Asian market more broadly.