Binance Coin was up more than 25% in the last 24 hours, hitting a high of $11.00, driven on news that it will launch its own “tailored blockchain” in an apparent first step toward building a decentralized exchange (DEX). The market cap was just shy of $1 billion. Close to $200 million had traded in the last 24 hours. The currency has a total supply of almost 200 million coins.
Binance Coin ranked as the 24th largest cryptocurrency today based on market capitalization, according to coinmarketcap.com, surpassing Zcash, the 25th cryptocurrency with a market cap of $780.431 million.
The Binance price began to move beyond the low single digits in mid-December, rising to $21.78 on Jan. 13, 2018, then tumbling to $7.38 on Feb. 6 before mounting the current recovery. While the price has not reached its mid-December peak, it is trading well above its early period.
New Blockchain Drives Interest
The Hong KKong-basedexchange, which regularly ranks as a top-three cryptocurrency exchange as measured by daily trading volume – announced its plan for a tailored blockchain in a blog post, explaining that Binance Chain will “mainly focus on the transfer and trading of blockchain assets, as well as provide new possibilities for the future flow of blockchain assets.”
Changpeng Zhao, the CEO at Binance, tweeted that Binance was growing too quickly and did not have time to “start anything else. So all we could do is, to just start one more Binance.” Zhao also tweeted an image of the Binance logo, which he noted was a voluntary submission.
Decentralized Exchanges Have Issues
Decentralized exchanges allow users to trade crypto assets without entrusting their coins to third parties, whose centralized platforms provide hackers with lucrative attack vectors and have collectively lost more than $1 billion worth of assets.
The most well-known DEX is EtherDelta, which uses smart contracts to allow users to trade ERC20 tokens, which all run on the Ethereum blockchain. DEX platforms are not completely safe since their website servers are centralized, but they are much less vulnerable to large-scale thefts than conventional exchanges.
On March 8, the price of bitcoin dropped below $9,500 briefly, triggered in part by Binance hack rumors.
Almost immediately, Binance, refuted the rumors and Zhao released a statement regarding the situation, and the market recovered.
The Binance team stated that hackers obtained the account information of users on the Binance platform through phishing attacks throughout February. Then, with the accumulated accounts, the hackers used a false API key to execute trades on behalf of users, triggering one cryptocurrency pair to spike in volume.
Binance reversed all trades, and no losses were recorded.
Progress Continues
Binance continues to make progress since it launched in a July 2017 ICO that raised approximately $15 million, and its early user base was characterized by a heavy geographic concentration in China.
Binance has managed to become the world’s highest-volume cryptocurrency exchange that does not support fiat trading pairs, and it often outpaces exchanges that do offer fiat pairs.
