Cryptocurrency exchange Binance announced on Friday that it is restricting access to its platform by Hong Kong residents with immediate effect.

“We will be restricting Hong Kong users in respect of derivatives products (including all futures, options, margin products, and leveraged tokens) in line with our commitment to compliance.”

Users from Hong Kong will also have a 90 days grace period, to be announced later, to close their open positions. During this time, no new positions will be allowed to open.

“This is one of many proactive measures Binance is taking to help establish crypto compliance best practices worldwide,” said CEO Changepeng Zhao.

Meanwhile, as Jason Choi of crypto fund The Spartan Group noted earlier this week, crypto derivatives platform FTX allows registration from Hong Kong only for professional investors as proposed by the government in May.

Earlier in the morning, Binance also announced that it is updating its API services.

As per the changes, the leading crypto trading platform is limiting new API key creation by accounts that have only completed basic account verification effective from August 9 at 03:00 (UTC).

For those accounts that haven’t completed identity verification, all the existing API keys will be deactivated after August 23 at 00:00 AM (UTC).

Binance attributed these changes to “to ensure a safe and fair trading environment for all users and remain compliant with the latest industry requirements.”

The exchange recently implemented KYC (know-your-customer) measures, under which it drastically reduced the amount of BTC unverified users can withdraw in a day. Until July 27th, those basic account users who didn’t complete their KYC could withdraw 2 BTC per day, but it since then reduced to merely 0.06 BTC.

As we reported, Binance has been taking concrete steps towards regulatory compliance after getting bashed with regulatory scrutiny from all over the world.

Amidst this, the exchange partnered with crypto-fiat gateway Alchemy Pay to allow its users to make crypto payments on the e-commerce platform Shopify and other networks.

This partnership facilitates a payment bridge between crypto and fiat, allowing Binance Pay users to send and receive payments in over 40 supported crypto assets, as announced this week.

It was just back in March when Binance Pay added features for merchants to accept crypto payments, and the month before that, it launched peer-to-peer payments.

Meanwhile, Alchemy Pay operates in 18 countries with the goal of driving crypto adoption in financial institutions and merchant networks, already covering e-commerce giant Shopify, Hong Kong's Pricerite, Arcadier SaaS, Singapore's Ce La Vi, QFPay, and others.

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