Binance

Most known for its CEX and its BNB Chain (fka BSC)

Basics

• Binance is currently a Cayman Islands based company. Binance has launched (4-2019) its Singapore fiat-to-crypto exchange, its third after exchanges in Uganda and Jersey
• Since 2017
• Mainnet release: 1-9-2020
• Reportedly asks 100.000$ for listing a new coin.

History

• In early 2022, Binance Smart Chain got rebranded into BNB Chain.
• From this article (20-8-2020):

"Binance was founded in 2017 by ex CTO of OKCoin, Changpeng Zhao (CZ), who raised US$15M to fund the company through an initial coin offering. The token sold was Binance Coin (BNB), which initially gave discounts on trading fees for users who held the token in their exchange wallet. BNB has been developed into an entire ecosystem since then - BNB coin has its own purpose built blockchain, is used to buy into Initial Exchange Offerings (IEO’s), and has many other applications within the Binance ecosystem."

Audits & Exploits

• Bug bounty program can be found here (7-2021), which is a $10M Bug Fund.
• CertiK claims to have done an audit for them, according to their website (12-6-2020). It is also selected as a partner (23-9-2020) for auditing Binance Smart Chain and projects building on that platform. 

Bugs/Exploits

• From DeFi Prime (8-3-2021):

"It was only a matter of time until we started seeing rug pulls on other centralized EVM-based chains. We got a glimpse of that this week when Meerkat Finance was drained and then undrained on Binance Smart Chain (BSC)."

• When asked if Binance will interfere with exploits on its BSC chain a representative answered (27-5-2021):

“It is not possible in the way that a lot of people think for there to be some kind of rollback.”

Binance, Binance Chain and Binance Smart Chain (BNB Chain)

• From Bankless (18-3-2021):

"Binance

One of the largest centralized exchanges—no need to go much deeper here. However, it's worth noting that Binance is also an umbrella brand for the overall Binance ecosystem—a true behemoth in the crypto world, containing a venture fund, project launchpads, an incubator lab, a charity fund...you get the idea.

Binance Chain

This is the first blockchain network under the Binance brand. It uses Tendermint and thus it can be seen as part of the Cosmos ecosystem. It was launched in 2019 and it was deliberately designed to not support smart contracts. With that, the main use case was trading via Binance DEX—a ‘decentralized’ exchange used to bootstrap liquidity of multiple non-ETH projects, including Thorchain. Thorchain also currently uses it (BEPswap resides on Binance Chain). I couldn't find the details about validation. The FAQ says:

“Binance Chain uses BFT and PoS (upcoming) based consensus mechanism to produce blocks among a series of qualified Validators...The process for setting up validators among different entities on Binance Chain is currently being defined.”

It's safe to assume that the validator set of the Binance Chain is centralized.

Binance Smart Chain

Binance leadership was not satisfied with lagging adoption of Binance Chain. While alternative ecosystems were busy building the basic rails, the wave of innovation with DeFi was concentrated on Ethereum. Acknowledging this, Binance forked Ethereum EVM and bootstrapped a second blockchain—Binance Smart Chain, with support of smart contracts.

It's essentially an Ethereum copycat with increased throughput and a centralized validator set of 21 validators handpicked by the leadership (kinda like EOS). They call it PoSA = Proof of Staked Authority.

Having two blockchains under one brand is pretty confusing and I am not sure why they didn't name it differently. However both blockchains now reside on the main Binance domain and form what Binance calls a “dual-chain architecture”."

Token

Binance

Total supply	Supply: 197,192,382 BNB

 ICO

• In July 2017, Binance (BNB) launched, just after raising $15 million in an initial coin offering for its own token, BNB which was first based on Ethereum; users of the token receive a 50% discount on transaction fees.
• From Token Tuesday (8-10-2019):

"Binance released its whitepaper in June 2017, outlining an ambitious goal to build a world-class digital asset exchange. The project successfully raised $15M in July of 2017 with BNB set at a base conversion rate of $0.10 per token (1 ETH = 2700 BNB)."

Token allocation

• Allocation: 50% ICO, 40% Founding Team, 10% Angel investers

Utility

• Token to be used on the Binance (decentralized) exchange which gives you 50% discount on the trading fees. Binance Coin (BNB) is also the native token of both Binance Chain and Binance Smart Chain.
• From Token Tuesdays (8-10-2019):

"Trading discounts

First and foremost, BNB can be used to cover maker and taker fees when trading on a Binance exchange."

Lottery Tickets

Binance’s Lottery System determines IEO eligibility based on the amount of BNB held in any given wallet throughout a predefined window of time. It’s important to note that the larger your BNB holdings, the more lottery tickets you will receive. This does not guarantee access but rather increases the chances that you will be able to participate in the sale (in rare cases more than one time). Similarly, the amount of BNB required to receive a lottery ticket along with the number of lottery tickets earned is changed on a case-by-case basis."

Community voting

Binance recently picked up community voting again with a new spin. Rather than having voting be tied to one vote per account, the new system ties token ownership to voting weight. Similar to the layout for the Lottery tickets, the more BNB you hold, the more votes you receive. Furthermore, there are only two coins competing against one another, rather than a slew of projects with little to no attention.
Generally speaking, the thought here is that this system makes it much easier to distinguish if whales (otherwise known as traders with large BNB holdings) would be interested in trading a specific proposed token. Similarly, strong supporters of a given project would be likely to go out of their way to accumulate more BNB seeing as the voting is no longer equal across the board. While the ethics behind this schema may be debated, this method of community voting will likely inquire a strong demand for BNB than previous methods. 

DEX Transactions

This past year marked the launch of Binance Chain, a native chain in which BNB is used to process all transactions on the network. This was largely due to the development of a native decentralized exchange (DEX) which saw many stagnant ERC or NEP tokens migrating to the BEP standard in the hopes of capturing more trading volume. Binance continues to influence the use of the DEX by signaling that projects with *significant* volume on the DEX has a strong chance of being listed on the main site. It only seems logical as those with the most volume on the DEX are also generating the most income to Binance in the form of BNB transaction fees."

Burnings

• From this article (30-7-2020):

"Each quarter, the board of the Binance exchange buys BNB tokens from the market for 20 % of the proceeds of the transaction fees and then 'burns' them (Proof of Burn), that is, it permanently removes from the market."

• From Token Tuesdays (8-10-2019):

"As originally outlined in the whitepaper, the company is scheduled to burn BNB every quarter based on the amount of total trading volume over the past 90 days. On average, Binance has burned 0.78% (1,557,906 BNB) of the total supply per quarter. If this held true for the remainder of the burning events moving forward, Binance will hit its 100M BNB burning allocation between July and October of 2033. Seeing as the BNB being burned is coming from the team internal reserve, these events do not have a direct correlation on price as if they were purchased off the open market. With this being said, burn events can still be seen as a long-term value driver behind Binance Coin as scarcity plays an increased role as time goes on."

• Binance quietly updated their white paper with significant revisions surrounding Binance Coin burnings; according (18-4-2019) to The Block, who spoke with Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao, the white paper's language was clarified for legal and descriptive reasons; commentators say the language change most likely reflects securities concerns, but would have little effect on any regulators assessments.
• In 2019, the team burned a total of 5,321,482 BNB (US$207,338,000) burned. This is up from $120,000,000 worth of BNB burned at the end of 2018. 
• A twitter thread on 21-1-2020 further went into the numbers and concluded: 

"My theory is that Binance is just burning more BNB because they already have it in treasury anyway (why not?) and if they burn more, it gives them more headlines and the appearance that Q4 was really successful. Which, if you look at all the data, just can't be possible"

• From Bankless (5-5-2020):

"An example of an off-chain capital asset (albeit one without the legal protections of traditional equities). A portion of profits generated by the Binance exchange is used to burn tokens. These cash flows aren’t autonomously driven by protocol code—humans are involved. Revenues aren’t on-chain and transparent, you have to trust the numbers from a crypto bank. Off-chain cash flow tokens like BNB are a form of psudeo-equity. They’re like securities, but without legal protections."

• From Decrypt (17-10-2020):

"The Malta-based exchange said its 13th token burn, which destroyed 2,253,888 tokens or 1.13% of the token's supply, is its highest-ever burn in terms of dollar value and the fourth-highest in terms of the amount of BNB burned."

• From Decrypt (19-1-2021):

"Binance has completed its quarterly token burn. The exchange removed roughly 3.7 million Binance Coin (BNB) from circulation worth roughly $165.8 million, according to an announcement published today. This is the largest token burn so far."

• From their twitter (16-4-2021):

"Binance completes 15th Quarterly #BNB Burn. A record $595.3M USD has been burned!"

• From their twitter (18-7-2021):

"Binance Completes 16th Quarterly BNB Burn. $393.6M USD has been burned!"

• From their blog (18-10-2021):

"Today we completed our quarterly BNB burn, permanently removing 1,335,888 BNB, or the equivalent of approximately $639,462,868 USD from circulation."

Token Details

• Binance announced that it has successfully deployed the genesis block of Binance Chain and plans to execute mainnet swap on April 23. Binance DEX is built on top of Binance Chain with a native Binance Coin (BNB) token. Binance Chain uses Delegated Byzantine Fault Tolerance (dBFT) as its consensus mechanism.

Stablecoin

Binance stablecoin (BUSD)

• Has its own stablecoin integrated in its exchanges.

Venus (VAI)

• From The Block (28-9-2020):

"Binance has unveiled a new “decentralized” stablecoin system called Venus. The system is built on the Binance Smart Chain and will mint the decentralized stablecoin called VAI, backed by a basket of various BEP-20 tokens (BEP-20 is Binance's token standard). The Venus protocol can be seen as a mixture of MakerDAO and Compound, said Binance CEO Changpeng “CZ” Zhao.

"VAI is minted by the same collateral that is supplied to the protocol. Users can borrow up to 50% of the remaining collateral value they have on the protocol from their vTokens to mint VAI," said Binance. "The collateral provided to Venus will be represented by vTokens (such as vBTC) which will enable users to redeem the underlying collateral as well as to borrow against it."

Using the Venus protocol, users will also be able to stake their Binance coin (BNB), Binance stablecoin (BUSD), and Swipe (SXP) tokens into separate pools to farm Venus (XVS) tokens, beginning Tuesday. Binance will then list XVS into the Innovation Zone on October 6 and open trading for XVS/BTC, XVS/BNB, XVS/BUSD, and XVS/USDT pairs. The protocol is developed by Swipe Wallet, which Binance acquired earlier this year for an undisclosed amount. Binance first revealed a project called Venus last August. At the time, Binance said Venus would be a "regional version of Libra.""

• From this article (29-9-2020):

"According to a tweet by Joselito Lizarondo, founder of Swipe Wallet and Venus Protocol, the BSC-based platform is a fork from Compound (COMP) and Maker (MKR).

Venus does not include any VC pre-mined tokens or team allocation funds in a bid to fully decentralize the project. The VAI token is a multi-collateralized stablecoin offering cross-chain collateral with other crypto assets based in the BEP-20 format.

The platform allows over-collateralized lending with 75% or lower of the assets supplied on the Venus Protocol and interest-earning on collateral supplied. Users can also stake their vTokens (e.g., vETH) to mint VAI stablecoin, which is pegged to the dollar at a ratio of 1:1." 

Coin Distribution

• From Bitcoin.com (28-1-2022):

"Coincarp.com metrics indicate that the top ten BNB addresses possess 88.23% of the supply. Onchain stats further show there are 321,134 BNB holders today. The top three BNB addresses are operated by Binance’s exchange platform, as the richest BNB holder is an exchange wallet with 52.02% of the BNB supply. The second-richest BNB wallet operated by Binance holds 27.14%, while 3.55% of the supply is also held by the third-largest address owned by the trading platform. BNB metrics indicate that more than 82% of the BNB supply is held by Binance operated wallets."

Tech

• Whitepaper can be read here.
• Code can be viewed [insert here].
• Built on: Binance Chain is built on Tendermint and Binance Smart Chain is forked from Ethereum to be EVM compatible.
• Programming language used:

Transaction Details

• Capacity (TPS): BSC has 300 transactions per second, according to Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao.
• Latency:

How it works

• The Binance exchange uses Infura, which became painfully clear when it went down for a couple of hours (11-11-2020).
• Binance Smart Chain runs alongside the Binance Chain blockchain. The key difference is that it has smart contracts (like Ethereum) that allow users to run applications on the blockchain.

• Is still permissioned. "Not everyone can run a validator node and the initial validators are selected by Binance though plans are for validator participation to open up to more people."
• All 11 pre-selected validators are now online to produce blocks with consensus from the genesis block. The Binance Chain explorer and wallet will be open to public access around April 23. Binance said that no trading pairs will be listed until the first batch BNB conversion has occurred. Changpeng Zhao (CZ) tweeted that he made the first transaction on mainnet.

Binance Smart Chain (BNB Chain)

• Binance is planning (17-4-2020) a centralized (DPoS) EVM chain:

1. "t’s a sovereign blockchain, which will provide security and safety to all users and developers.
2. It’s EVM-compatible and will support all of the existing Ethereum tooling along with faster and cheaper transactions.
3. Its native dual chain interoperability will allow cross-chain communication and scaling of high-performance dApps that require fast and smooth user experience.
4. Its on-chain governance with Proof of Staked Authority consensus, built on 21 validators who validate the transactions, will provide decentralization and enable significant community involvement."

• Binance Chain has announced (1-9-2020) the mainnet launch of Binance Smart Chain (BSC). While Binance Smart Chain is self-custodial, the blockchain is only partially decentralized. There are centralized elements to it, helping the blockchain run at fast speeds, with a high capacity. 
• It relies on a network of 21 validators using Proof of Staked Authority (PoSa) consensus.
• From Bankless (23-2-2021):

"BSC is a fork of Geth—one of Ethereum’s clients—with one main difference: it uses Tendermint BFT consensus (i.e. Cosmos tech) with 21 trusted validating nodes instead of the Ethereum 1.0’s proof-of-work. 21 entities come to consensus on the state of Binance Smart Chain, and these 21 entities are all extrapolations from Binance and its leadership."

• 15 of the 21 nodes are controlled by Binance (23-2-2021).
• Ankr as become one of the 21 validators of BSC (8-3-2021).

• From Wilson Withiam (12-4-2021):

"BSC has 21 active validators, making it more centralized than most platforms. This validator set is determined daily by Binance Chain, a network managed by just 11 validators. BSC's active validator set resets daily based on each validator's voting power (staked BNB + any delegations). All BNB staking and delegation takes place on Binance Chain through a staking module. Binance Chain validators manage this module, thus all BSC validator accounts. BSC now supports several third-party validators, although at least 5-6 others have close ties to Binance. The distribution of validator accounts is far less clear for Binance Chain. They each take turns producing blocks in a seemingly predefined order. There doesn't appear to be any stake-weighted mechanism to determine which one produces the next block."

Liquidity Mining

• Has what they call a Launch Pool, which resembles liquidity mining. For more info look below under 'Other Projects'.

Interoperability

• "Loom PlasmaChain & Loom Wallet Are Now Interoperable with Binance Chain — Bringing an ERC20–BEP2 Bridge and Smart Contract Functionality to Binance" (7-2019)
• Their Smart Chain is EVM compatible.
• Has Binance Bridge; which allows users to wrap assets from other blockchains and bring them to BSC (23-2-2021).

Oracle Method

• DIA has integrated itself with BSC (10-2-2021).

Compliance

• Binance is being investigated by the CFTC (13-2-2021).
• Binance is under the lens of European Regulators for Stock Token Offering (27-4-2021).

• From Rekt (28-4-2021):

"The BSC system is not as closed as it once was. There are multiple bridges out of BSC now, and they’re not all controlled by Binance, meaning CZ can’t blacklist all the addresses and keep the stolen funds on BSC."

• When asked if Binance will interfere with exploits on its BSC chain a representative answered (27-5-2021):

“It is not possible in the way that a lot of people think for there to be some kind of rollback."

Their Other Projects

Axie Infinity

• Is a validator on the Axie Infinity Ronin sidechain (24-12-2020).

Binance Liquid Swap

• From CoinDesk (4-9-2020):

"Is in effect an automated market maker (AMM) exchange where smart contract-based liquidity pools set spot prices and facilitate swaps. This is the same model used by Uniswap. The three initial trading pairs will be USDT/BUSD, BUSD/DAI, and USDT/DAI."

CryptoSafe Alliance

• From CoinDesk (27-8-2020):

"Binance is launching the CryptoSafe Alliance platform in partnership with Oasis Labs, a data privacy company, to prevent and analyze cryptocurrency fraud. The CryptoSafe Alliance will begin by offering post-mortem analyses of any hack or breach of contributing members, allowing members to have a better understanding of how to avoid similar attacks in the future. According to a statement announcing the alliance, addresses will be blacklisted when they are found to be complicit in criminal activity such as money laundering, fraud, extortion or theft. 

“By using a combination of privacy-preserving technologies and a decentralized blockchain, the Oasis Network is able to ensure that the CryptoSafe Platform is trustless,” said Vishwanath Raman, Privacy Architect at Oasis Labs. “Each exchange that is part of the alliance can upload threat intelligence without it ever being shared with other partners.""

DeFi.org

• From Cointelegraph (11-1-2021):

"Orbs and Binance announced Monday the launch of a new accelerator for the DeFi ecosystem. Named DeFi.org, the accelerator focuses on supporting the research and development of open-source software and community development in the DeFi space. The accelerator will evaluate projects based on their innovativeness and composability within the space, as well as principles of fair distribution, community ownership, sustainable economics and a sound approach to risk management.

In line with the sponsorship, startups will have additional consideration if they are willing to apply for participation in Binance’s “Bridging DeFi and CeFi” program or the Orbs Grant Program. The wider accelerator program is, nonetheless, blockchain agnostic and allows anonymous developers to participate as well.

DEX

• Has released a Bitcoin-pegged token,  BEP2 , on its DEX Binance Chain to increase liquidity and volume; Binance noted that the use of Bitcoin decreased decentralization on the DEX but increases auditing capabilities versus other ledger styles. The post states that BTCB are 100% backed by bitcoin, with the reserves easily visible as they are recorded on the public blockchain. Binance noted that using bitcoin as a backing asset for the new token allows for more convenient audits

Launch Pool

• From CoinDesk (7-9-2020):

"Binance has released Launchpool, a way for users to make income by staking tokens for so-called yield farming. The first project to be hosted on Launchpool is Bella Protocol (BEL), which recently raised $4M in a seed funding round led by Arrington XRP Capital.

Users will be able to stake their tokens in three separate pools to farm – earn profits by providing staked liquidity – BEL tokens over a 30 day period starting Wednesday.

A week later, on Sept. 16, Binance will list BEL for trading and open trading pairs on its exchange for BEL/BTC, BEL/BNB, BEL/BUSD and BEL/USDT (tether)."

Mining Pool

• From CoinDesk:

"Is planning (1-4-2020) to launch its own mining pool. “The company has already hired some professionals for this purpose, some of them former Bitmain employees. The launch is planned for the Q2 2020,” Coinlife wrote."

Acquisitions

• Binance is set to acquire (31-3-2020) CoinMarketCap, the deal could be worth as much as $400 million. Update: the deal went through.
• From CoinDesk (8-5-2020):

"Binance entered the derivative game by buying the JEX exchange in September. The futures market leads in volume after only seven months of operation and now sits in contention with perennial favorites like BitMEX for most open interest, a measurement of the aggregate open long and short positions on a market.

A joint effort with peer-to-peer exchange Paxful suggests fiat-stablecoin aspirations. A strategic investment in upstart FTX represented another bet on crypto derivatives."

• Binance acquired Swipe for an undisclosed sum (7-7-2020).

IEO's

• From Token Tuesdays (8-10-2019):

"For those unfamiliar with the Initial Exchange Offerings (IEOs), Binance was at the forefront of a revived utility token fundraising mechanism that gained traction throughout 2019. In short, rather than a team conducting an Initial Coin Offering (ICO) and then listing on a reputable exchange, IEOs takes the entire process in-house. Historically, Binance IEOs have offered more advantageous deal structures than ICOs in the form of lower hard caps and purchasing limits to further democratize the capital pool.

Roadmap

• Can be found [Insert link here].

Usage

• From Decrypt (14-10-2020):

"PancakeSwap holds over $218 million on its smart contracts and is the biggest liquidity provider on the BSC. It added that a total of over 180 projects—all building on the BSC—had applied for grants under the accelerator fund."

• From Decrypt (11-2-2021):

"Binance Smart Chain (BSC) is starting to match Ethereum (ETH) on some key network numbers—but it’s all dependent on one single application, according to DappRadar’s report published today. “In January BSC reached new heights in terms of transaction volumes and unique active wallets. If the trend continues in February, BSC might become the number one blockchain in terms of transaction volume,” the researchers summarized. In January, the total transaction volume on BSC amounted to $15 billion. This is up considerably compared to previous months. Venus (XVS) is responsible for over 90% of the total transaction volume."

• From The Defiant (24-2-2021):

"Ethereum has 30x the number of unique addresses at almost 140M accounts, compared with BSC’s 5.2M, according to Etherscan and BSCScan. Ethereum processed $112B in transactions last month, compared with BSC’s $15B, according to DappRadar. Total Value Locked in DeFi is at $54B on Ethereum, or more than five times TVL in BSC, according to data compiled by The Block.

On the surface, it looks as though BSC’s daily transaction count has started dwarfing Ethereum’s rate by two to one. On Friday, BSC’s total transactions breached 3M according to BSCScan. By comparison, Ethereum daily transaction count has never been above 1.5M.

Twitter user ChainLinkGod.eth has pushed back on Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao’s celebration of BSC’s success, pointing to a smart contract which has generated over 100K transactions in the last two days and over 750K total as an example of how the company may be manipulating the metric. “The hundreds of thousands of failed transactions on BSC I posted about are from an PancakeSwap arbitrage bot with a very low success rate,” ChainLinkGod told The Defiant. “It appears to be inflating the transaction volume metric which is often used to promote the amount of user activity on BSC versus Ethereum.”

• From CoinDesk (23-4-2021):

"While the Ethereum blockchain processed a record 1.56 million transactions on Wednesday, BSC registered a total transaction volume of 9.13 million, according to data provided by EherScan. BSC-based PancakeSwap, which generates liquidity from traders who stake tokens, known as “farmers,” alone processed more transactions than Ethereum. PancakeSwap contributed more than 2 million of BSC’s transactions on the day, or some 20% of the total."

• From Our Network (15-5-2021):

"Active wallet addresses on Binance Smart Chain continue to grow at increasing rate compared to Ethereum, accelerating to rate 3x higher than Ethereum since the start of May (with average growth rates of 4.8% vs 1.5%, respectively). Compared to Ethereum’s daily average growth rate for transaction (at ~0.3%), BSC’s daily average growth rate for transactions is 9x greater (at ~2.9%)."

Projects that use or built on it

• More than 450 projects are building on BSC (21-4-2021).
• 0x Protocol; deployed contracts on BSC (18-3-2021); "There is no new ZRX token on BSC. There has been no change in how the canonical ERC20 ZRX token functions on Ethereum."
• AnySwap
• Arkane Network
• Autofarm; is a copycat of Yearn
• Axelar
• BadgerDAO; planning to deploy (17-3-2021)
• BakerySwap
• Bashmasks; copy of Hashmasks (4-3-2021)
• Binance Punks; copy of CryptoPunks (4-3-2021)
• Bitquery
• Bitsika
• BopenSea; copy of Opensea (4-3-2021)
• Brave; According to Brave, BAT is now available as a wrapped token on BSC (20-3-2021).
• bZx's Torque and Fulcrum went live on Binance Smart Chain (17-3-2021).
• Capitalise
• Celestia; participated in their $1.5M seed fundraise (3-3-2021).
• Cream Finance launched on Binance Smart Chain (11-9-2020).
• DeFiDollar; planning to deploy on BSC (1-4-2021).
• DexGuru has announced its launch on BSC (18-3-2021).
• DODO; launched on BSC (22-2-2021).
• Effect Network; left EOS towards BSC (26-3-2021).
• Gelato Network; will deploy on BSC (6-5-2021).
• Keylabs
• Linear Finance will use Binance Smart Chain as a L2 solution (9-9-2020).
• Matcha; integrated into BSC (18-3-2021).
• Mavrik
• Mirror Protocol; synthetics (3-2021).
• Social platform Mithril has announced that it will migrate its token from the ERC-20 format to Binances new BEP2 token following the earlier launch of Binance Chain; Mithril, which partnered with Binance to be the first token to migrate to the new chain, highlighted the benefits of the Binance DEX as a reason for the move.
• Nym
• PancakeSwap; BSC clone of Uniswap
• Phishfort
• Plasm
• Prosper; will integrate (18-12-2020) on Binance Smart Chain in December 2020.
• Proxima
• Raise
• Republic
• SafeMoon
• Strike Protocol
• SushiSwap; deployed its contracts on it as part of adding support for 5 new chains (4-3-2021).
• Swipe will built on top of Binance Chain (20-8-2020).
• Torus Labs
• TurtleDex; file storage project which exit scammed (20-3-2021).
• Unmarshal; announced it will add support (24-3-2021).
• Verasity moved (4-7-2019) from Ethereum to Binance Chain.
• Yellow Card

Pro's and Con's

Pro's

• Binance Smart Chain has low fees, liquidity and is composable due to its EVM fork.

Con's

• Loads of node validators started to complain about the bad state of the tech (11-2021).
• From Token Tuesdays (8-10-2019):

"Binance’s recent change from a mandated BNB burn using 25% of the company’s profits have been substituted with a far more ambiguous “we will destroy BNB based on the trading volume”. The lack of transparency surrounding the burn events makes it very difficult for traders to know how much BNB will be burned, or how much Binance had made in profit on any given quarter.

The last potential concern surrounding Binance is identifying the advantages that Binance Chain offers over other rising smart contract platforms, like Ethereum."

• Has KYC for BinanceUS, whereas before sign-ups only required an email. "With BinanceUS now mandating KYC for sign-ups in parallel with the lack of altcoins and other features, US investors have little incentive to move away from other major US exchanges, such as Coinbase."
• Participated in the Tron takeover of the Steem blockchain. From DAR Weekly (6-3-2020):

"Sun with the assistance of major exchanges Binance, Huobi, and Poloniex (recently acquired by Tron) used their stake of STEEM (native currency of the network) to prevent the soft fork as well as release the founders fund of STEEM, which accounts for approximately 20% of the circulating supply. Moreover, the funds were utilized to take over the majority voting rights and replace the previous Block Produces with loyal ones. The funds deployed by exchanges were determined to be those owned by individual users, who face a 13-week lockup period. As a result, a huge community backlash ensured, with the departures of multiple Steem developers as well as the Head of Communications.

Objectively speaking, since the announcement on February 14th, the STEEM token has declined 27%. As for the Steemit community, it has not only turned against Justin Sun, but also the very exchanges that aided in the takeover, despite Binance and Huobi citing misleading information."

• Binance its dual chains are both centralized.
• From Bankless (18-3-2021):

"BSC can scale with Ethereum, but without the world class researchers and developers that work on Ethereum they are destined to wait for Ethereum to innovate and fork the innovation."

• Coin concentration is highly centralized among the top ten addresses, going over 80% (28-1-2022).

Team, Funding, Partners, etc.

Team

• Changpeng " CZ" Zhao; CEO
• Wei Zhou; ex CFO, left suddenly after three years (10-6-2021).
• Binance hired (19-8-2021) Greg Monahan, a former IRS official, to head its global money laundering team; it will also apply for registration with the central bank of the Netherlands after being issued a warning for operating illegally.
• Head of Binance Labs Bill Qian Is leaving the firm (3-6-2022). The announcement comes a few days after Binance Labs said it raised a $500 million fund.
• During the market crash of 2022 it announced that the company is hiring 2000 employees (5-7-2022).

Funding

• Chris McCann was an early investor in Binance (20-3-2021).
• 1inch. Binance Labs participated in a $2.8M raise for 1inch (11-8-2020).
• Audius. Binance Labs participated in on of its two funding rounds (27-10-2020).
• Biconomy; participated in a $1.5M seed round (19-1-2021).
• Chiliz; Binance is named as a strategic investor
• Covalent; Binance Labs was part of a $2M round (26-3-2021).
• Cred. Is a backer (29-5-2019) of Cred, which it also has a partnership with.
• DODO. Binance Labs participated in a $5M raise for DODO (15-10-2020).
• EPNS; Binance Labs is named as one of the backers (7-5-2021).
• Furucombo. Binance X invested (9-2-2021).

• LayerZero; Binance Labs was part of their first Series A round of $6M in 9-2021.
• Mask Network has received investment from Binance (1-4-2021);

"This strategic investment is part of Binance’s $100 million accelerator fund for developers to build blockchain projects on Binance Smart Chain and Mask Network will work closely to build the Multi-Chain Universe."

• MATH; Binance Labs lead a $12M round (17-12-2020).
• Moonbeam; part of a $6M raise for PureStake (30-3-2021).
• Multicoin Capital; is one of its backers (2-3-2021).
• Nym; has funding from Binance Labs (27-2-2021).
• Oasis Network; Binance Labs in an investor (13-11-2020).
• Perpetual Protocol; Binance Labs was part of a $1.8M private sale and holds around 6 of the 150M tokens (8-2020).
• Tellor. Binance Labs is an investor in Tellor (16-8-2020).
• Terra. Is one of the backers (9-3-2020) of Terra.
• Tranchess; Binance Labs was part of the $1.5m seed round (5-7-2021).
• Twitter; committed $500M to finance Elon Musk's takeover (5-5-2022).
• According to this twitter thread (7-9-2020):

"Binance backs Band, FTX (aka SBF Alameda, the new sushi controller), and Serum (via 3commas Cap)."

• From Decrypt (14-10-2020):

"Announced a $100 million accelerator fund (9-2020) for its Binance Smart Chain ecosystem, the first six blockchain projects who got funding are AnySwap, Arkane Network, BakerySwap, Bitquery, PancakeSwap, and Proxima. The six funded projects range from automated market makers and data platforms to gaming solution providers. Of those, PancakeSwap holds over $218 million on its smart contracts and is the biggest liquidity provider on the BSC. It added that a total of over 180 projects—all building on the BSC—had applied for grants under the accelerator fund."

• Launched a $1 billion fund for growing the Binance Smart Chain (BSC) ecosystem (12-10-2021).
• Announced a new half-billion dollar fund. The $500 million will be invested in Web3 projects. The fund has big backers: Internet investment capital firm DST Global and global venture capital firm Breyer Capital are both involved.

Partners

• Uses Trust Wallet as its partner wallet.
• Has been talking to Facebook about becoming a Libra node. "Zhao said that Binance is “definitely considering” the option, although a final decision is yet to be made."
• Is named as part of the MetaCartel ecosystem (as of 1-2020 on the website)
• Verasity and Binance are partners (26-5-2019).
• It has (21-2-2020) "made major contributions to the core Cosmos software, protocols, tools, and/or community."
• From CoinDesk (17-3-2020):

"Binance and India-based bitcoin exchange WazirX – which Binance acquired in November – announced Tuesday their new "Blockchain for India" fund would incubate and invest in local startups that contribute to the creation of a sophisticated cryptocurrency and blockchain ecosystem for the subcontinent. Worth a total of $50 million, the fund will make investments anywhere between $100,000 and $5 million."

• Brave has partnered (24-3-2020) with Binance to let users trade cryptocurrencies on its new tab page. 
• Is a partner with Alchemy, according to their website (20-4-2020). 
• Runs an Enterprise Validator Node for Theta (12-6-2020. 

• Is a partner of Atomic Wallet (16-8-2020).
• Sits on the board (22-9-2020) of the Blockchain Association. Coinbase left in protest.
• Is called 'family' by the Injective Protocol (19-10-2020).
• Is mentioned by Oasis Network as of its partners (30-12-2020).
• Mentioned (12-7-2021) as a partner on the website of DFI.Money (YFII)

Binance Chain Alliance

• Verasity is part of it (9-2019).

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