Hello. Time now for the top business stories. I'm Sally Bundock, and we start in the US and the future of the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange. Binance, its founder and chief executive, Chang Peng Shu, known as CZ, could be facing jail time to federal money laundering charges. The company has been hit by a record fine of more than $4 billion. And since the news broke, many customers of Binance have been withdrawing their money from the exchange. As Erin Delmore reports, finance's customers are.

Absorbing the news and they're pulling their funds. The world's largest crypto exchange has seen outflows of around a billion dollars in the last 24 hours. That's on the heels of news that its founder and CEO has pleaded guilty to charges of violating antimoney laundering rules and agreed to pay a $50 million fine. Finance agreed to pay a $4.3 billion fine. US Attorney General Merrick Garland called it one of the biggest penalties ever obtained. The data comes from blockchain analysis firm Nansen, and that billion dollar total doesn't include Bitcoin. The exchange's native cryptocurrency Binance coin also took a hit in value mr. Zhao and his company's guilty pleas and a years long investigation into Binance. But the company continues operating under the leadership of senior Binance executive Richard Tang. Binance will also have a government appointed monitor and the company is required to ensure it's in compliance with US laws. And the exchange is still the world's largest, holding more than $65 billion of assets.

That's aaron delmore. Well, let's get reaction from Joshua Mahoney, chief market analyst at Scope Markets. Good morning again, Joshua. I mean, no surprise at all that people would pull out of the Binance exchange given the news of this week. But what do you think about the overall feeling about cryptocurrency? It's another big scandal following FTX.

Yes, I actually think this in a strange way is good news for cryptocurrencies. Bear in mind, this has been looming large for some time now. And certainly if we look at what happened with FTX where people lost their money, sam Bankman Freud ended up in jail. This is a relative slap on the wrist. I mean, look, he gets to step down from his position. They've already got someone stepping straight into the CEO role. You're seeing a billion taken out of the platform. Well, ultimately that could have been a much larger amount. And certainly the idea that we could see a sort of run on the bank in crypto style, I just don't think has happened. If you look at the price of Bitcoin, it's pretty much back up to where we saw it prior to the announcement analysis. One sort of major hurdle that has been cleared. Certainly we've grown quite accustomed to looking at big banks and seeing them being fined on a regular basis. And you bear in mind that a lot of these crypto firms are relatively new, they're unregulated. And so it stands to answer that if you look at the way they have been operating in their infancy, it probably hasn't been perfect.

And this is all part of the process towards getting them into a position where they're aligned from a regulatory perspective with the kind of actions and activities that you would expect from a big bank rather than an unregulated entity.

And that's the issue, isn't it? And it will raise this debate again about cryptocurrency going forward to what extent it should be regulated to protect consumers, to protect users. Because of course, when this all started many years ago, there was the real concern that cryptocurrencies could be used by bad actors because they can't be tracked.

Indeed. And that's part of the problem here, isn't it? I mean, you're talking about companies that thus far have been incentivized to try and grow as quickly as possible and try to gain market share. And clearly some of those decisions have been taken against the practices that would be encouraged by the regulator. And that's something that the actions that are taken against Binance, against FTX, clearly are aimed at clearing up. But as we move forward, I think that the crypto space clearly is cleaning up. We're looking at the potential for an ETF or a number of ETFs to come in over the course of the next year. That's where we see the big banks, the likes of BlackRock and alike, coming into the fold. And it seems like cryptocurrency as a whole really is starting to become a lot more commercialized people paying tax on it. Potential for these different platforms to have to announce your earnings. And who has money on the platforms to the tax man. Certainly things are a little bit different from where they were back at the infancy of this technology.

Okay. Thank you so much. Joshua mahoney there from scope markets.