Crypto Exchange Allots $1B to Boost Startups
Multi-language cryptocurrency exchange Binance has set aside about $1 billion to further the growth of startup companies in the cryptocurrency industry.
Binance will boost blockchain and cryptocurrency startups through its “Social Impact Fund,” which shall be given over 10 phases of $100 million each, which will entail creating a fund to invest in other types of funding and a direct fund to support blockchain projects.
Ella Zhang, head of Binance Labs, said the exchange is also launching a Binance Ecosystem Fund to tap 20 fund managers who have managed $100 million worth of assets.
“[W]e like small funds managed by experienced investors,” Zhang said in a Twitter post.
She added investments will be made through the company’s own BNB token and the money will come from the bourse’s own reserve as one way of contributing to the crypto community.
A Binance spokesperson earlier told TechCrunch additional details about the initiatives will be revealed soon.
A blockchain-based ride-hailing application being planned in China is the first recipient of the Binance funding. Chen Weixing, CEO of app developer Funcity and former founder of Chinese ride-hailing app Kuaidi Dache unveiled this ride-sharing app similar to Uber at a Big Data expo in Guizhou, China last week with Yang Jun, co-founder of Meituan, one of the largest group discount apps in China.
“Ridehailing is the first time blockchain will be tested on a social application on mass scale,” Chen, who is also the founder of Chinese ride-hailing app Kuaidi Dache, said in his WeChat post.
The Chinese businessman, however, did not divulge the blockchian platform to be utilized for designing the planned app or how he intends to deal with the technology’s scalability issues.
“We believe it’s a disruptive social experiment. Binance Labs hopes to work with more aspirational projects to explore blockchain applications and together move forward the growth of the industry,” Zhang said.
According to Coinmarketcap.com, Binance is the most active crypto bourse worldwide with more than $5 billion of digital currencies traded in the past 24 hours as of press time.
Binance, which relocated to Malta, supported in April four blockchain undertakings such as headlining a $30 million funding round for crypto startup MobileCoin that is denominated in bitcoin and ether.
“Investment is all one level, and it is held on a long-term basis,” Zhang had said at that time. “We do proper asset management. We like to lock in long-term projects. Investors and entrepreneurs are locked together. Not believers do not enter.”
On its website, MobileCoin published in December its primary objective in the crypto market.
“Most attempts at building a compelling crypto-currency user experience unfortunately resort to trusting a third party service to manage keys and validate transactions. This largely sacrifices the primary benefits offered by crypto-currency to begin with,” the company said.
“MobileCoin is an effort to develop a fast, private, and easy-to-use cryptocurrency that can be deployed in resource constrained environments to users who aren’t equipped to reliably maintain secret keys over a long period of time, all without giving up control of funds to a payment processing service,” it added.
