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The world’s dominant crypto exchange, Binance, has been in the headlines for most of the week following its decision to delist a major cryptocurrency. The debate as to whether this was the righteous thing to do to rid the ecosystem of a bad actor, or it was a kick in the teeth for decentralization by a corporate giant, still rages on.
There is no doubt that Binance has ambitions well beyond a digital asset exchange. It appears to be angling to become the Google of the crypto world with an ever expanding array of crypto and blockchain related services.
Binance Chain Versus Ethereum
The latest of which, according to The Block, has targeted the world’s second largest crypto platform Ethereum. Despite charismatic owner Changpeng Zhao playing down the firm’s role in the industry, Binance has become a behemoth with the power to make or break a crypto project. This was made painfully clear to Bitcoin SV holders earlier this week.
Not me. A single exchange delisting don't impact long term price. There are hundreds of thousands of exchanges in the world. https://t.co/rsjneej5fV
— CZ Binance ??? (@cz_binance) April 16, 2019
Binance launched its own blockchain service, Binance Chain, last year and its own native cryptocurrency has surged in value. BNB is currently the seventh largest crypto with a market cap of $2.7 billion which puts it above Tether. It seems that the all-consuming Malta-based Corporation is still hungry.
Binance is the world’s go-to exchange and the pinnacle for a crypto project in terms of listing as it has massive liquidity and a rapidly growing user base. It appears, according to the report, that Binance is now attempting to leverage that influence and persuade blockchain teams to migrate to Binance Chain over Ethereum. It goes on to claim that some token teams had already been approached with the following veiled statement that has yet to be independently verified;
“Well, let’s just say that projects who move some % of their chain off of Ethereum to Binance Chain will get favorable treatment — and those that don’t could be delisted if their volumes are less than $1M/day,”
Binance does have the power of life or death over many smaller cap coins, and even some of the larger ones as we have just seen. Its Launchpad program injected the first breaths of life into Tron’s Bittorrent Token simply because it had exclusivity, a huge audience, and a lot of marketing kung fu.
As Google can dictate the success of a website in terms of search rankings, Binance appears to be wielding the same power over token listings and it clearly doesn’t plan to stop there.
Ethereum delisting is obviously out of the question for now. However a future where the corporate crypto goliaths conduct business as the tech and internet monopolies of today are doing would unravel everything that Satoshi Nakamoto had in mind when he spawned Bitcoin a decade ago.
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