1 apology, 200 million users, Binance’s 7-year tempering history

On July 17, Bloomberg Businessweek (Chinese version) issued a statement saying: "A serious mistake was made in the 250th issue of the magazine (July 6, 2022), and a false and unnecessary article was published. According to the cover title, this publication mistakenly wrote "Changpeng Zhao's Ponzi Scheme". This publication unreservedly retracts and retracts this offensive statement, and apologizes to Mr. Zhao Changpeng and Binance "

Justice only. Will be late, will not be absent. After two years, CZ and Binance finally apologized. At this time, Binance’s 7th anniversary has just ended. Like many times in the past, this time Binance is moving towards “de-stigmatizing” the industry. One step further.

Previously, on the 7th anniversary day, Binance co-founder He Yi, who has always been known as "Chief Customer Service", frankly confessed the secret of Binance's success in a celebration video: "The first point of Binance's success is the environment, which is the current situation. The second point is the people, not only the management team, but more importantly our entire community, everyone is passionate about the industry. It is Binance’s community and team that jointly create Binance’s success.”

Binance again. Ushering in a new stage, this year has been exciting and intense. Binance has reached development milestones and successfully passed the biggest "crisis moment" in history.

An industry “veteran” tempered in the crisis

A few days ago, Binance released its anniversary letter, This is Richard Teng's first anniversary since he took over as CEO in November last year.

“By general standards, most companies that have been established for seven years are still in the early stages of growth and are ambitious start-ups; but in the crypto-asset industry, companies that have been established for seven years have almost always remained leaders during this period. With this position, Binance has become a very experienced industry veteran, having survived and prospered through various development periods in this most rapidly changing industry in history,” Richard wrote.

Binance, tempered in the crisis, is full of veteran resilience.

In the past year, Binance’s biggest crisis moment was undoubtedly the swing of the big stick of US regulation. In the early morning of November 22 last year, the U.S. Department of Justice held a press conference to announce the charges against Binance and eventually reached a settlement with a fine of US$4.3 billion. At the same time, CZ will also pay a fine of US$50 million and face imprisonment in the United States. What should be pointed out is that in the accusation, Binance was not mentioned as having misappropriated user funds or manipulated the market, which also confirmed its previous commitment to user funds.

It can be said that CZ used his own "sacrifice" to take the initiative to plead guilty and serve his sentence, in exchange for Binance's continued operation and the legal foundation for its everlasting business. In May of this year, during the trial in the United States, the judge said that he had learned about CZ through 161 letters of plea, and believed that he had assumed extraordinary responsibility. He ultimately rejected the 36-month sentence recommended by the Ministry of Justice and sentenced him to 4 months.

In the eyes of industry insiders, this is a strategic compromise by Binance in order to be able to get away with nothing. When the regulatory boots are officially implemented, it can continue to serve crypto users for a long time in the future under clear regulatory boundaries.

This time, Binance once again experienced crisis but finally won.

Now, Richard Teng, who is in charge of Binance, is also an experienced veteran. Prior to joining Binance, he worked at the Monetary Authority of Singapore for 13 years. He served as the Chief Regulatory Officer of the Singapore Securities Exchange (SGX) for nearly 8 years starting in 2007, responsible for the rulemaking, framework and policy of listing, trading and clearing. , and then served as head of the Financial Services Regulatory Authority of the Abu Dhabi Global Market for six years.

As Richard summarized, difficult challenges and exciting moments of success coexisted in the past year. Despite the change of management, signs of renewed user confidence were seen in the strong inflow of funds and the soaring number of new registrations.

The choice of 210 million users, the original intention of "user-centered" remains unchanged

Not long ago in June, Binance announced that registered users had reached 200 million.

Where did these 200 million users come from? Let us set the clock to 12:00 on July 14, 2017 (Beijing time). Binance trading platform is officially launched. A simple announcement of a few sentences and three exclamation points may have been CZ’s determination at that time.

Then various crises came one after another. Less than two months after its establishment, it encountered severe challenges from domestic supervision. Chinese ICO projects have had to return funds to investors. As soon as the ban came out, the prices of many ICO tokens plummeted. Several projects listed on Binance even fell below the issue price, and the project team did not have enough funds to repay investors. However, Binance made a surprising decision and used US$6 million, which accounted for 40% of its operating funds at the time, to compensate investors.

“In terms of percentage, it was the largest expenditure in the history of Binance. At that time, we were only a two-month-old start-up and had not yet achieved profitability. We were still burning money for recruitment and purchasing servers. etc. But my only thought at that time was to protect users,” CZ recalled in his message on the 6th anniversary.

One month later, Binance’s user base reached 120,000 and began to make profits. Another two months later, on December 18, 2017, Binance became the exchange with the largest trading volume in the world.

He Yi described his feelings in the past 7 years as carefully walking through all kinds of storms to get to where he is today. “Since the first day of its launch, and since BNB dropped 50%, Binance has been navigating various storms and cautiously reaching today. We always believe that only by protecting users and being a fair and transparent platform can we The road for the entire industry will become broader and broader. "

"User-centered" is the most important consideration in all decisions we make, and Richard also upholds this belief. Just one month later, Binance’s users have increased by 10 million to 210 million.

In the crypto industry full of changes, it is like driving on a sea with undercurrents. Only by following the lighthouse can you sail to the other shore. For Binance, this beacon is the original intention of being “user-centered”.

Binance’s Anniversary Report Card

In addition to the milestone moment of 200 million registered users. Earlier this year, the amount of user funds under custody on the Binance platform exceeded $100 billion for the first time.

To promote the popularization of crypto assets and financial inclusion, Binance continues to expand product coverage, ensure accessibility to the wider crypto space, and provide important financial services, including MegaDrop and Web3 wallets wait.

Binance also released a series of latest data for its seventh anniversary.

Currently, Binance supports a total of 541 digital assets and 2,632 crypto asset trading pairs. The system already supports handling a large number of user activities. The Binance platform’s all-time high Queries-per Second (QPS), a number that can be used to measure the number of users sending requests to the system and receiving responses per second, is as high as 2.58 million. This value shows that Binance is able to handle very large loads smoothly when users need it most.

In terms of products, the Simple Earn product line supports users to increase their crypto assets among 392 crypto assets, and has currently attracted more than 8 million users to experience Binance Finance. Serve. More than 24 million people around the world use Binance Pay for a safe and efficient domestic or cross-border money transfer experience.

In terms of communicating with regulators, Binance has obtained licenses and registrations in 18 jurisdictions, ranking first among all centralized crypto asset trading platforms. Between June 2023 and May 2024, the Binance team handled 62,800 law enforcement requests, bringing the total number of requests handled to 173,800.

In addition, in terms of user asset security, the SAFU fund size has always been maintained at more than 1 billion US dollars. At the beginning of this year, Binance exchanged all SAFU funds into the more trustworthy and transparent stablecoin USDC, further enhancing the reliability of the fund pool and ensuring that its value is stable at US$1 billion.

The debate over currency listing, Binance is taking the blame for the market

Recently, the biggest controversy against Binance is that it is accused of frequently listing new coins with large market capitalization, draining market liquidity, leading to depression and affecting copycats Quotes.

In response to this question, He Yi frequently responded. In her view, these doubts are just opinions, not facts. From last year to this year, the number of coins listed on Binance was only about 30. On the other hand, the number of coins currently listed on some platforms in the market starts at 100. The cryptocurrency market is a free market. Binance’s currency listing strategy does not affect the flow of funds. Trading volume and liquidity will be distributed throughout the industry, including centralized exchanges (CEX) and decentralized exchanges (DEX). .

"This wave of so-called bull market is not driven by innovation, nor is it driven by huge changes in the industry. In fact, it is driven by independent events such as ETFs." Undoubtedly, there is a lack of new funds entering the market and the PVP model with tight liquidity on the market Next, the big fish eats the small fish, and retail investors who have not made any money can only vent their emotions on Binance.

Return to the original function of the trading platform, which is to provide relatively hot and high-quality assets currently on the market. This process tests the asset appraisal level of the exchange. He Yi also admitted before that there are indeed contradictions in the currency listing process, and there are loopholes in any policy. The overall process is a battle of wits and courage. In the future, Binance currency listing and investment incubation hope that more blockchains will be used by entrepreneurs, and It’s not about welding users to death in airdrops and trading scenarios.

"We hope to screen out those project parties who have worked for three days and run away, and screen out those project parties who have a chance to succeed or have a chance to live longer." He Yi said, the road knows the power.

In addition, high market value projects supported by VCs also need to be viewed dialectically. Project parties that have received large amounts of VC financing have more possibilities to survive the bubble cycle, but the fundamentals of the currency price and governance model are determined by the project party. There is no standard answer, and a more in-depth analysis of the project token is required.

Binance also continues to clean up zombie tokens or problematic projects. Regularly review the tokens that have been launched, focusing on indicators such as continued development, liquidity, negative information, etc. Tokens that are found to be relatively risky will be labeled with a monitoring label. Not only social media activity will be reviewed, but liquidity, development progress and regulatory requirements will also be reviewed. On July 8, Binance delisted the trading pairs of four tokens: BarnBridge (BOND), Dock (DOCK), Mdex (MDX) and Polkastarter (POLS).

The greater the energy, the greater the responsibility. Whether you like Binance or not, you have to admit that the world’s number one crypto exchange carries the expectations of more than 200 million users and has set an example for the industry.

Finally, I wish Binance a happy 7th anniversary.

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