The United States has had a long history with crypto-based exchanges. Ever since the Mt. Gox hack caused thousands of people to lose billions of dollars’ worth of crypto assets, the regulatory bodies have been monitoring the crypto-based businesses, especially exchanges, very closely. America has seen a number of exchanges closing their doors due to regulatory constraints. The world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange by volume Binance had barred U.S based users from accessing its global version Binance.com.

Now, Huobi, the Singaporean crypto exchange giant is all set to freeze the accounts of their United States based customers. As per a statement released on their website, the exchange is on a mission to crack down on customers that have violated the user agreement. The number of United States based accounts have been decreasing over the past few months, and this announcement comes right after this and will lead to a total freeze of all US-based accounts by November 13th.

A part of the announcement reads:

“In line with the laws and regulations of the United States with respect to crypto-assets, our User Agreement expressly prohibits users in the United States from using our platform. For that reason, the accounts of US users have been gradually disabled to prevent any further trading or transferring.”

Huobi, at one point, had the highest trading volumes among exchanges in Asia. After China and other nations began cracking down on crypto exchanges, Huobi started making moves towards global expansion. Huobi has always been strict towards restricting services for users based in America, but there were various workarounds and cases where many US-based users were able to create an account and perform restricted trades on the trading platform.

This, however, doesn’t mean that Huobi will be ceasing the funds of the users who are violating the user agreement. The exchange is providing a grace period for the users to withdraw their funds and the deadline is 13th of November. During this time users will also be able to refund Huobi Point cards.

The announcement also states that users will also be able to withdraw their funds to the exclusive US strategic partner of Huobi Global, HBUS. The HBUS is said to be compliant with the US regulations and also offer a wide variety of tokens for trading. The register an account, users must visit www.huobi.com/register for an individual account or www.huobi.com/institutional-register for a corporate account.

