The Blackmoon Cryptocurrency exchange, which wanted to be the first to start trading Gram tokens, is closing. The exchange's CEO Oleg Seydak told CoinDesk about this.

According to him, the closure was caused by high costs of compliance with regulatory requirements.

“We came to the conclusion that it is impossible to operate a cryptocurrency exchange, complying with all the EU requirements, which are constantly changing for the worse, and still be competitive,” Seydak explained.

Blackmoon partnered with Swiss-based Gram Vault, which planned to provide storage services for the Gram cryptocurrency, CoinDesk reports.
In addition, the publication writes, the exchange worked with TON Labs, an unofficial technical partner of Telegram, and was also associated with the Cypriot credit trading platform Blackmoon Financial Group. It was founded in 2014 by Ilya Perekopsky, who later became vice president of Telegram.
The exchange reported its links to the Telegram cryptocurrency project in the fall of 2019, before the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) secured a temporary ban on the issuance of Gram. The regulator claims that Telegram was going to sell tokens as securities without registering them, as required by US law.
At the end of March 2020, the court agreed with the SEC's arguments and banned the Gram issue planned for April.

Exchange that wanted to become the first seller of Telegram cryptocurrency announces closure