Binance to Pump USD 1B Into Its Chain, Aims for Billion Users

Major crypto exchange Binance said it has dedicated more funds towards growing the ecosystem of its smart contract blockchain, Binance Smart Chain (BSC) – this time promising to inject a whopping USD 1bn.

Per the press release, the platform has launched a USD 1bn Crypto Mass Adoption Fund for BSC, with the aim “to accelerate adoption of digital assets and blockchain technology.”

The fund will be divided across four key initiatives, it further explained, these being:

• Investments
• Builder Program
• Talent Development
• Liquidity Incentives.

Of this money, USD 500m will be divided amongst the latter three initiatives. Builder Program will be getting USD 300m, while Liquidity Incentives and Talent Development get USD 100m each, according to Binance.

The other USD 500m should be reserved for investments, in order to “accelerate mainstream adoption of decentralized financial infrastructures.” And while BSC is not decentralized, the exchange said that these funds should be used to grow decentralized computing, gaming, metaverse, virtual reality, artificial intelligence (AI), and blockchain-based financial services.

Prior to this, the exchange had already invested USD 100m to support decentralized finance (DeFi) projects on BSC in September last year.

According to Binance CEO Changpeng ‘CZ’ Zhao, with this initial funding of USD 100m, BSC’s growth has attracted over 100m users. The CEO added that,

“With the additional contribution of [USD] 1 billion, BSC will be better equipped to disrupt traditional finance and accelerate global mass adoption of digital assets to become the first-ever blockchains ecosystem with 1 billion users.”

However, he didn’t specify when it might happen.

According to BscScan, there are about 99.1m unique addresses on BSC as of October 11, and 6.95m daily transactions.

For the sake of comparison, we can look at Etherscan, which shows 172.2m unique addresses on Ethereum (ETH) on the same date, as well as 1.19m daily transactions.  

Per DeFi Llama, BSC is right behind Ethereum when it comes to total value locked (TVL), but the difference between the first and the second place is huge: Ethereum’s TVL is USD 140.35bn, while Binance’s is USD 17.69bn. The latter had hit its all-time high of USD 32.26bn in mid-May. For Ethereum, the ATH was USD 145.42 seen in early September.

“With the [USD] 1 billion initiative, our focus will be widened to building cross-chain and multi-chain infrastructures integrated with different types of blockchains,” said Gwendolyn Regina, Investment Director, BSC Accelerator Fund. “We’re gearing up to bolster the adoption of crypto and blockchain to accelerate its growth globally.”

Under this fund, BSC’s mentoring committee will help developer communities around the world reach new audiences, as well as provide academic scholarships to institutions, and support research and development in emerging technologies. “A total of 100 innovative dapps/infra building on top of BSC will receive mentoring from top VCs along with funding opportunities,” said the press release.

Meanwhile, the BSC community should also run regional and global hackathons, joint bug bounty programs, and developer conferences, with a focus on “blockchain-rich regions” such as Russia, India, South East Asia, Europe, United States, and South America.

At 14:02 UTC, binance coin (BNB) is trading at USD 429. It’s up 2% in 24 hours, while it remains unchanged in a week.
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