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Binance’s Former Russia Head, Blum Co-Founder Arrested in Connection to Fraud Case
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Camomile Shumba
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By Camomile Shumba|Edited by Nikhilesh De
May 19, 2025, 3:53 p.m.
- Vladimir Smerkis, Binance’s former Russia division head, was arrested in Russia for unspecified fraud allegations, a local media outlet reported.
- The trading app he co-founded — Blum — said Saturday on X Smerkis was no longer involved in the project.
Vladimir Smerkis, Binance’s former Russia division head, was arrested in Russia for being connected to a large-scale criminal fraud case, local media outlet TASS reported on Sunday.
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Zamoskvoretsky District Court, which resides in Moscow, granted an investigator’s request to detain Smerkis, an unnamed law enforcement agency source told TASS. The report did not share specific details of the fraud case. CoinDesk was unable to contact the Zamoskvoretsky District Court for more information.
Smerkis co-founded trading app Blum in December 2023 but the company said Saturday on X he had stepped down from his role as chief marketing officer and is no longer involved in the project. He has also been the managing partner of four other ventures including Tokenbox.io and The Token Fund according to LinkedIn.
Prior to starting Blum, Smerkis worked for the Binance crypto exchange from 2022 for just under two years. In that time he was the head of Russia and later the head of its Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) business, according to LinkedIn. The CIS is a group of 11 nations which coordinate on key decisions like trade and lawmaking; Russia is among those nations.
Binance did not return a request for comment.
Camomile Shumba is a CoinDesk regulatory reporter based in the UK. Previously, Shumba interned at Business Insider and Bloomberg. Camomile has featured in Harpers Bazaar, Red, the BBC, Black Ballad, Journalism.co.uk, Cryptopolitan.com and South West Londoner.
Shumba studied politics, philosophy and economics as a combined degree at the University of East Anglia before doing a postgraduate degree in multimedia journalism. While she did her undergraduate degree she had an award-winning radio show on making a difference. She does not currently hold value in any digital currencies or projects.
