Legal authority constraint — exchange custody (2024)

Tigran Gambaryan was released from Nigerian detention on humanitarian grounds in October 2024 after eight months in custody, during which he contracted malaria, pneumonia, and sustained a herniated disc injury. The money laundering charges against him were dropped, though Nigeria continued proceedings against Binance itself. Gambaryan later described his detention as a hostage situation—the criminal charges were used as leverage to extract regulatory and financial concessions from Binance. The episode demonstrated how state-level disputes with exchanges could translate directly into access and custody constraints for ordinary users of those platforms, independent of any wrongdoing by the users themselves.