Binance exiting Canada does not mark the end of Grant Vingoe’s quest to bring the crypto industry into compliance—but it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.

In an interview with The Logic, the chief executive of the Ontario Securities Commission said he believes regulators have reached an inflection point in their two-year-old crackdown on cryptocurrency-trading platforms. Binance was the last major international platform active in Canada that had neither signed an agreement to follow certain rules while pursuing registration, nor pulled out of the country. With the company’s announcement earlier this month that it will stop offering services to Canadians, there are no more big-name crypto firms operating in a regulatory grey area.

It’s a major change from the spring of 2021, when The Logic reported hundreds of companies were offering cryptocurrency-trading services in Canada without registration and it was unclear how successful efforts to rein them in would be. Today, Vingoe is feeling vindicated.

“We developed a sensible regulatory approach that provided a path to regularize their activities,” he said. “That was probably a breath of fresh air to many of the crypto platform operators who didn’t have the same path in other jurisdictions.”

Canadian regulators have taken a unique approach to crypto regulation that stands in contrast with the enforcement-first tactics of the U.S. Here, the OSC and its ilk have asserted that though the most popular cryptocurrencies are not necessarily securities themselves, the contracts many trading platforms enter into with customers are. In the regulators’ view, that means platforms with Canadian customers should be registered securities dealers.

In the spring of 2021, Wealthsimple was the only firm officially greenlighted by regulators to offer crypto to Canadians. Following a push from regulators that has included a series of deadlines, warnings, increasingly detailed guidance and enforcement action, Coinsquare and Fidelity are fully registered with the Canadian Investment Regulatory Organization, with an additional eight firms approved as restricted dealers.

Binance’s statement highlighted that it is joining “other prominent crypto businesses” in exiting Canada amid the regulatory crackdown. Fellow international platforms dYdX, Paxos and OKX have indeed also recently left the country, but other big names including Coinbase, Kraken and Gemini have opted to stay and work with regulators.

Lori Stein, co-head of McCarthy Tétrault’s fintech group, said the process hasn’t been perfect and would benefit from more public consultation, but overall, the regulators have achieved something impressive. “It is a testament to [their] ability to cooperate that they were able to roll this out in relatively short order across the country with a fairly uniform application,” she said.

Eric Richmond, chief operating officer of the Toronto-based cryptocurrency-trading platform Coinsquare, said he’s glad the regulatory process has reached this point, but expressed concern that the large international platforms are still being held to a different standard. Registered Canadian platforms have long complained that their unregistered competitors have been allowed to continue operating without trading limits and other restrictions as long as they were engaged with regulators.

That complaint still holds, Richmond said. The international platforms that have signed agreements to complete the registration process continue to face fewer restrictions and less oversight than those that have already gone through it, creating an unlevel playing field in the meantime, he said.

“It’s good to see there’s definitely progress,” he said. “But there’s still work to be done.”

Vingoe said the rules that platforms at various stages of the registration process must follow are “broadly similar,” with the expectation that everyone will eventually have to become a fully licensed securities dealer. He said the crypto industry’s call for a slowdown and more consultation on the regulatory regime is a bit ironic, considering what regulators have had to adapt to.

“It’s kind of inconsistent in my mind for industry to say, ‘Oh, we’ve come this far in a less regulated environment. Now, you pause while we continue our business,’” he said. “It doesn’t seem realistic.”

Canada’s securities regulators have faced criticism from domestic platforms for their inconsistent approach to enforcement over the past two years. The OSC took a more aggressive approach than its peers, levying cease-trade orders and fines against four offshore companies since the 2021 crackdown.

That led to a situation where, until recently, many international platforms restricted their use by residents of Ontario, but not by people in the rest of the country. Under pressure following the collapse of crypto giant FTX, in February regulators gave platforms 30 days to sign pre-registration agreements, exit the country or face a renewed wave of enforcement.

Vingoe said the OSC’s relatively strict enforcement efforts were crucial to the success of the crackdown. “By the time we had brought those actions against some of the larger players that had an impact in Ontario, others saw the light and left or sought to come into compliance. So there was a little bit less enforcement activity for the other jurisdictions to carry out,” he said.

While Vingoe cautioned that Canadian regulators’ willingness to register crypto-trading platforms is “not an endorsement of the asset class,” he’s not a blockchain skeptic. Institutional use of blockchain technology is “going to be transformational,” he said, pointing to the fractionalization of assets and incorporating regulatory requirements through smart contracts as interesting potential use cases.

Crypto is far from finished posing a challenge to regulators, but Vingoe said he’s ready to stop being consumed by the topic.

“I’m hoping a lot of the big issues have been settled and that it won’t take up quite as much time,” he said. “I’m hoping we won’t have to struggle with big issues.”