According to Coin360, Binance has experienced over 30% growth in trading volume over the past month. The Hong Kong-based firm shows the largest average monthly traffic, with over 18 million users.
Earlier today, Binance announced the launch of its Peer-to-Peer (P2P) Merchant Program, a user-oriented fiat currency trading platform.
How the program works
In the Jan. 21 press release, the crypto exchange cites increasing demand of global users and a need for higher liquidity as prods for the P2P creation. Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao said:
“In the past quarter, there has been increasing growth in trading volumes on Binance P2P platform, and we have constantly received requests for more fiat-to-crypto access from our global community. To meet the growing users demand, we are seeking credible merchants for Binance P2P trading platform globally.”
Merchants on the iOS- and Android-enabled platform earn money when they post fiat currency trading advertisements. Binance providers users with support, and there are no transaction fees.
Who uses the program
The company – whose United States arm, Binance.US, released its app earlier this month – launched its P2P trading platform in October 2019. At the time, merchants joined strictly through invitation and referral. Now, the merchant program is available through open enrollment. The quality of user experience is reportedly controlled through an “elimination mechanism.” According to Binance, promotional activities will become available to users in the future.
Cointelegraph contacted Binance.US for comment though hadn’t received any at press time. This article will be updated upon receipt of a response.
Yesterday, Cointelegraph reported on the P2P platform’s inclusion of the Vietnamese Dong as another important step in decentralization.
Bitcoin SV Genesis Upgrade Results in Chain Split
Bitcoin SV (BSV) performed a scheduled upgrade named Genesis on Feb. 3. As most nodes have not yet updated, this resulted in a minor chain split where two versions of BSV exist.
As reported by BitMEX Research, the upgrade occurred at block height 620,538, or about 8:30 PM EST. The subsequent block was considered invalid by old rules, signaling the hard fork.
About one quarter of all blockchain nodes are still on the old version, meaning that these cannot synchronize to the main chain.
Furthermore, a chain split occurred several hours later. The old chain was extended by one block, meaning that some miners have also failed to upgrade to the new rules.
This does not appear to be a premeditated attempt at creating a new chain. With only one block added in more than 10 hours, only a very small minority of miners are left behind the old chain.
What is Genesis?
Genesis changes many of the consensus rules for Bitcoin SV to remove all remaining limitations. The block size is now effectively unlimited. Instead of being hard-coded in the node software, block size is now a parameter that miners can reduce manually.
This could potentially lead to issues down the line if not all miners agree to a particular value. A block bigger than the maximum allowed size for a certain group of users would be considered invalid by them. By default this setting is unlimited.
Many other limits were raised as well, such as the maximum size of a transaction or the number of owners for a multisig wallet.
The Bitcoin Script language now has a formalized grammar that will be checked by consensus participants. The upgrade has also restored OP_RETURN, an instruction for storing custom data on the blockchain.
While the changes are seemingly minor, any modification to consensus rules always requires a hard fork.
