Mastercard Ends Partnership With Binance in Bahrain and 3 Other Countries
The winding down of Mastercard’s relationship with Binance comes amid an increasingly fraught legal and public relations crisis for the world’s largest crypto exchange
Mastercard and crypto exchange Binance announced the end of their four crypto card programmes in four countries, including Bahrain.
A Mastercard spokesperson said the joint crypto card programme in Argentina, Brazil, Colombia and Bahrain will come to an end as of September 22, Reuters reported.
In a separate announcement, Binance’s customer service account announced the breakup in a post on X (formerly Twitter) on Wednesday evening.
“The Binance Card will no longer be available to users in Latin America and the Middle East,” said the account.
“Only a tiny portion of our users (less than 1% of users in the markets mentioned) are impacted,” it added.
The Binance cards allowed users to make payments in traditional currencies, funded by their cryptocurrency holdings on the exchange.
Mastercard-Binance partnership terminated
The decision will not impact any of Mastercard’s other crypto card programmes, its spokesperson said.
Binance said its Mastercard partnership also will no longer include Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE.
The Mastercard, when asked to confirm exactly which nations in the Middle East would be affected, said in an email there were “only four pilot programmes in market” without specifying whether one of those was just Bahrain or the entire Gulf Cooperation Council.
A spokesperson for Mastercard said in an email to Fortune that waiting to end the partnership until late September “provides cardholders with a wind-down period to convert any holdings in their Binance wallet.”
A Binance spokesperson separately told Bloomberg that Visa, which had a similar partnership, stopped issuing co-branded cards in Europe last month.
The winding down of Mastercard’s relationship with Binance comes amid an increasingly fraught legal and public relations crisis for the world’s largest crypto exchange, Fortune reported.
Binance faces mounting regulatory pressure
The Commodity Futures Trading Commission sued Binance and its CEO, Changpeng Zhao, in May over the exchange’s allegedly deliberate efforts to direct American crypto traders away from Binance’s American subsidiary to its more profitable international exchange, among other allegations.
In June, the Securities and Exchange Commission sued Binance and Zhao, filing even more explosive allegations, including claims that the crypto exchange and its CEO flouted US money laundering laws.
And now, Binance and Zhao are facing a potential criminal indictment from the Justice Department, which has prompted a suite of executives to quit over Zhao’s response to the government’s investigation.
