WazirX Bank Accounts Unfrozen by Indian Authorities

WazirX Allowed to Restart Operations

India’s Enforcement Directorate (ED) has unfrozen WazirX bank accounts allowing them to restart banking operations in India. ED had earlier in January frozen assets worth Rupees 646 million (about US$8.1 million), amidst an investigation into dubious Instant loan apps, and off-chain transactions between the Indian cryptocurrency platform and Binance.

“After an in-depth internal investigation, WazirX noticed that most of the users whose information was sought by ED were already identified as suspicious by WazirX internally and were already blocked in 2020-2021," said the company in a statement.

WazirX said that it has cooperated with the investigation and is carrying out KYC/AML checks despite having no legal obligation to do so. The exchange had said they are like any other intermediary whose platform could have been misused by these “FinTech” companies with connections to China.

Binance had earlier this year denied owning WazirX, which led to a Twitter spat after the Indian company said the transaction had happened in 2019. In August, Binance announced it will remove the off-chain transfer channel between WazirX and Binance. WazirX had responded with a statement saying it can provide details of those transfers:

“There seems to be a major misunderstanding about off-chain transactions between WazirX and Binance. Off-chain transactions between WazirX and Binance can only be done by a user between his/her/its own account on the two platforms. Hence, KYC details are available for all off-chain transfers as well.”