Last Updated on January 22, 2023 by Bitfinsider

Signature Bank will only process customer transactions of more than $100,000, according to Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, as the bank reduces its exposure to digital-asset markets.

“One of our fiat banking partners, Signature Bank, has indicated that it would no longer service any of its crypto exchange customers with buying and selling sums of less than 100,000 USD as of February 1, 2023. This is true for all of their cryptocurrency exchange clients. As a result, certain individual customers may be unable to use SWIFT bank transfers to purchase or sell crypto for sums less than $100,000 USD,” Binance stated in a statement provided to Bloomberg News on Saturday.

According to a Binance spokeswoman, no other financial partners are affected. SWIFT is a network that financial firms utilize to communicate data and instructions.

Fears of digital-asset contagion have reached traditional finance businesses such as Signature and Silvergate Capital, whose shares fell as much as 40% after the bank announced that clients withdrew $8.1 billion in digital-asset deposits during the fourth quarter. Signature’s stock dropped 64% last year.

Signature, located in New York, said in December that it planned to withdraw up to $10 billion in deposits from digital asset customers as part of a broad withdrawal from the cryptocurrency market in the aftermath of the FTX debacle.

The decision comes after the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation issued a warning about the hazards of crypto-assets. The FDIC is the principal federal regulator in the United States for banks licensed by states that do not belong to the Federal Reserve System. While banking organizations are not prohibited or discouraged from providing banking services to customers of any specific class or type, the FDIC stated in a Jan. 5 statement that business models that are concentrated in crypto-asset-related activities or have concentrated exposures to the crypto-asset sector raise significant safety and soundness concerns.

Binance stated that it is “currently striving to identify an alternate solution” in a statement. Signature Bank also serves “0.01% of our typical monthly consumers.”