A new exchange has suddenly taken the crypto-space by storm, reaching 3 million users in mere six months since it launched on July 14th 2017 and growing so fast it temporarily does not accept new users at all.
“Servicing existing members is higher priority at this point,” Changpeng Zhao, Binance’s founder, says before further adding:
“Full team working around the clock. Both tech and support. Just too much demand. Added 250,000 new users in the last 24 hours. Just crazy!”
The Hong Kong based exchange held an ICO raising around 30,000 eth, currently worth $30 million, for 100 million BNB ECR20 tokens.
The raised funds are now dwarfed by BNB’s total market cap of some $1.2 billion with Binance’s founders holding half of it, but why did this exchange suddenly rise to top volumes of $10 billion in the past 24 hours, twice that of Bithumb?
The answer might be a number of reasons. First, it is the only exchange to offer Eth pairs, something many have asked for, especially with ever increasing bitcoin fees.
As such, instead of having no option but to buy, say, TRX with BTC, or a number of other coins/tokens, you can now choose whether to buy them with eth or with btc.
That in itself might have led to strong support by the eth community for the exchange and they indeed were the first to mention it in every two sentences.
Secondly, the ICO itself may have created a base of supporters who were monetarily incentivized to recommend the exchange.
With the third reason perhaps being that the team seems decent. Changpeng Zhao is no newcomer to this space. He was the third employee at blockchain.info and a co-founder as well as CTO at OKCoin.
He thus, presumably, knows a thing or two about exchanges. Binance boasts 1.4 million transactions a second, multilingual support, including in Chinese and Spanish, as well as multi-coin support.
It is probably the latter that has given rise to this exchange, proving once again that satisfying market demand can be very rewarding indeed.
Kraken used to be a lingering exchange of no one’s care until they added ethereum back when few had eth trading. Then, it suddenly became a player, until it could not keep up any longer with users given a catalogue of errors instead of a trading interface.
Binance might have perhaps risen in any event, but the market was demanding eth trading pairs, and with it so being the only exchange to provide them, it might perhaps be the primary reason it has so risen.
And with its rise, a new dimension might enter this space. Bitcoin’s only competitive advantage – trading pairs – might no longer be such an advantage as ethereum now enters to compete even in that area.
