Binance Updates Whitepaper to Avoid Complications Associated with the Term, “Securities”

Recently, Binance has supposedly made updates to their original whitepaper that was first released in 2017 reports The Block Crypto. An image of the way words has been removed and replaced has also been provided by the aforementioned news outlet, and it can be seen right below:

Figure 1: The image on the left (with the red highlight) is the original whitepaper and the image on the right are the changes made to the original. This shows how the two differ in words, but not so much in goals and how things are done at Binance.

Source 1: The Block Crypto

The Block Crypto supposedly spoke to the CEO of Binance, Changpeng Zhao, who noted that said changes were made mostly to ensure that investors had a clear understanding as to how things are done at Binance, especially when it comes to the burning of BNB tokens.

Zhao also noted that, the “profit language” had to be removed because of the fact that said profits may be associated with securities, which is something the team at Binance wants to “distance BNB from,” adding that in the future they, “plan to describe the burn this way and burn what we burn.”

This does not change the fact that BNB burned amounts equalling roughly 20% of the profits, as seen on the left picture in Figure 1. Interestingly, another source believes that this move was done to ensure that problems do not arise when it comes to regulatory frameworks.

According to the CEO of CoinRoutes, Dave Weisberger, a firm’s need to make such changes has been described as being “sad” because this implies that firms have to make the effort to “avoid the securities designation or to avoid the U.S.”

He also added that it would be ideal for regulators to work in such a way that protects investors and provides a framework for crypto firms specifically, as opposed to trying to push the securities framework.

Interestingly, it has been noted that simply changing terms on the whitepaper will not suffice. A lawyer at The Block Crypto, Stephen Palley has been quoted saying the following,

“Changing the language […] does not necessarily have an impact on a regulator’s analysis of whether or not something is a security.”