Good morning. Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, is exiting Russia by selling its operations there to a new crypto exchange known as CommEX.

“As we look toward the future, we recognize that operating in Russia is not compatible with Binance's compliance strategy,” said Noah Perlman, Binance's chief compliance officer.

Binance said Wednesday that "off-boarding" Russian customers would take up to a year. It didn't give financial details of the deal.

• Why? Binance last month introduced curbs on peer-to-peer trading in Russia, and said it was considering a full withdrawal from that market, after The Wall Street Journal reported on how Binance was helping Russians move money abroad.
   
• What's CommEX: It was launched Tuesday, according to a statement. It says it is a centralized digital-asset exchange backed by unnamed crypto venture capitalists. Its terms of use say the company is incorporated in the Seychelles. Binance said it won't have any ongoing revenue split from the sale, or an option to buy back shares in the business.
   
• Exit comes as Binance is in distress. Under threat of enforcement actions by U.S. agencies, Binance’s empire is quaking. Over the past three months, more than a dozen senior executives have left, and the exchange has laid off at least 1,500 employees this year to cut costs and prepare for a decline in business. And while Binance still looms large in crypto, its dominance is dwindling.

The WSJ Pro Sustainable Business Forum on Oct. 12 will include a discussion about risk and resilience in corporate sustainability programs with Maryam Golnaraghi, director of climate change and environment at The Geneva Association, and Torolf Hamm, head of physical catastrophe and climate risk management at Willis Towers Watson.

Other sessions will cover reporting to U.S. and European standards, the role of artificial intelligence and what corporate decarbonization measures are proving effective. Register here.

TikTok employees say executive moves to U.S. show China parent’s influence.

TikTok has spent the past three years trying to convince U.S. lawmakers it can operate independently in this country from its China-based parent company, ByteDance. After recent personnel moves, some employees aren’t so sure.

Since the start of the year, a string of high-level executives have transferred from ByteDance to TikTok, taking on some of the top jobs in the popular video-sharing app’s moneymaking operations. Some moved to the U.S. from ByteDance’s Beijing headquarters.

The ByteDance executives have taken on roles overseeing swaths of TikTok’s advertising business, human resources, monetization, business marketing and products related to advertising and e-commerce initiatives. Some have brought teams from Beijing.

FinCEN proposal would give new companies more time to complete ownership registration.

The newest companies would get an additional 60 days to add themselves to a corporate-ownership database under a proposal from the Treasury Department's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network. FinCEN proposed that companies created in 2024 get 90 days—rather than 30 days under its original plan—to get on the registry, which is intended to help combat money laundering through shell companies.

FinCEN said it has moved to extend the timeframe after speaking with trade associations, nonprofits and other stakeholders, adding it wanted to give companies more time to understand the new reporting obligation and collect necessary information. But the new deadlines would only impact a subset of corporations. Companies that have already been formed by Jan. 1, 2024, will have until 2025 to make their first filing, while companies formed in 2025 and beyond will have 30 days.

• Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan made her name in Washington by writing a withering legal broadside against Amazon that condemned the retailer for several forms of anticompetitive conduct. This week, she narrowed her sights. The FTC’s lawsuit against Amazon offers a more streamlined complaint than either Khan’s essay or an earlier congressional report about big technology companies that she helped write. For starters, the central charge is turned on its head.
   
• A sharply divided U.S. government panel has recommended Congress impose substantial restrictions on a powerful spying program that collects vast amounts of intercepted emails, texts and other electronic data, arguing the tool threatens Americans’ privacy.
   
• One of the American military campaigns unleashed by the Sept. 11 attacks, the fight against al-Shabaab has been marked by years of setbacks and stalemates. Now Somalia has become a surprising bright spot in the global battle pitting the West and allied countries against insurgents who use terror tactics in the name of political Islam.
   
• Donald Trump’s legal team sought clarity Wednesday from a New York judge who issued a ruling that potentially removes the former president’s control over part of his real-estate empire.
   
• Lululemon and Peloton are abandoning efforts to get into each other’s turf and instead striking a partnership that will let each company stick with its core business.
   
• One of the world’s biggest agriculture companies is accusing a startup of scheming to steal high-tech crop seeds. Corteva, the agriculture behemoth spun out of DowDuPont in 2019, on Wednesday filed a lawsuit in federal court in Delaware, accusing the seed-gene-editing company Inari Agriculture of illicitly obtaining Corteva seeds from a U.S. depository and illegally shipping them to Europe. Corteva alleges that the startup made small changes to the plants’ genetics and now is seeking to patent the seeds in the U.S.
   
• Security officials say India has expanded the presence of its spy networks in the Western world, including in countries such as the U.K., U.S., Canada, Germany and France, among others. The agency always had a representative in these Western countries, but in the past few years it has cultivated more local assets to assist in surveilling targets, sharing actionable info and assisting in covert operations, according to officials.

Standoff in Congress brings government to brink of shutdown.

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R., Calif.) rebuffed a bipartisan short-term funding bill from the Senate in favor of a House Republican plan driven by conservatives, as dim prospects for a deal raised the likelihood of a partial government shutdown starting this weekend.

Many lawmakers now anticipate that Congress will fail to fund the government past Sept. 30, a lapse that will partially close federal agencies and temporarily withhold pay for federal workers and active duty-military personnel.

Both the House and Senate are moving ahead with their own stopgap proposals intended to keep the government open while work continues on full-year funding legislation. Each plan is considered a nonstarter in the other chamber, however, with sharp differences on spending levels, Ukraine and border security.

• The United Auto Workers union pledged to widen its strike on Friday barring significant progress in talks with Detroit carmakers, as the companies take steps to keep critical parts flowing to their dealerships.
   
• China’s gigantic real estate bubble has popped, but despite the market’s prolonged downturn, prices still haven’t fallen much.
   
• An American soldier who fled to North Korea in July was released to U.S. officials in China and flown to a U.S. military base in South Korea, U.S. officials said.
   
• The race to hire warehouse workers and package carriers for the holidays is slowing to a crawl.

• Saudi Arabia and Russia have raked in billions of dollars in extra oil revenues in recent months, despite pumping fewer barrels, after their production cuts sent crude prices soaring.
   
• Since taking the reins as CEO in March, Starbucks CEO Laxman Narasimhan, is working to boost store staffing levels, personally directing the revamp of problematic cafes and tackling spotty store inventories.
   
• Baltimore police are searching for a suspect in the death of 26-year-old tech entrepreneur Pava LaPere.

Follow us on X at @WSJRisk. Follow Risk & Compliance editor David Smagalla @DSmagalla_DJ and reporters Mengqi Sun @_MengqiSun, Dylan Tokar @dgtokar and Richard Vanderford @VanderfordRich.

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