Colin Wu, a well-known crypto-journalist, reported on Bloomberg's announcement that cryptocurrency trading platform Binance has returned to South Korea. The parent company, Binance Holdings Ltd. has acquired a majority stake in distressed GOPAX.
This purchase was financed by an investment venture known as the "Industrial Recovery Initiative". Earlier, the management of Binance stated that it expects to attract about $ 1 billion from investors to take ownership of firms affected by the collapse of FTX and the cryptocurrency market at the end of 2022.
It was previously rumoured that Binance CEO Changpen Zhao is in talks with GOPAX to buy out the company. However, administrators of a major exchange and GOPAX representatives refused to confirm or deny these statements.
Initial information leaked to the press that Binance plans to buy a 41.2% stake from Lee Joon-Han, who is the founder and major shareholder of the GOPAX platform. It was also reported that he will remain chief operating officer of the platform, which is one of 5 licensed South Korean cryptocurrency exchanges authorised by the local financial regulator to provide cryptocurrency trading services.
Last November, when the FTX exchange was going through a liquidity crisis, decentralised financial service GOFi blocked withdrawals for its clients. This was due to the fact that the platform needed money and investors. Gopax was associated with products offered by Genesis Global Capital, which eventually went bankrupt.
On 31 December last year, GOPAX executives said that they had completed the due diligence process and were ready to enter into an agreement with a major cryptocurrency company, whose identity has yet to be disclosed.
