Binance, the largest cryptocurrency exchange by daily trading volume and the most controversial in recent months, announced yesterday that it had committed $1 billion to further boost its blockchain ecosystem, known as the Binance Smart Chain (BSC).
According to the announcement, it stated, “BSC is becoming one of the best blockchains to pilot and start new DApps. Its thriving community has more than 1m daily active users spread across more than 900 DApps, making BSC also one of the biggest crypto ecosystems in general… Binance announces the biggest funding program of its kind in the whole cryptocurrency industry – the $1 billion fund to push the adoption of not only BSC but the whole blockchain industry.”
It would appear that Binance is trying to get ahead of the herd on its investment positions in the BSC ecosystem because this comes after a number of other new Ethereum-alternative projects are also dedicating hundreds of millions of dollars in incentives.
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The breakdown
According to the news release, the newly launched $1 billion Growth Fund by Binance will be dedicated to four main categories in the BSC’s ecosystem; talent development which was allocated $100 million, liquidity incentive program which was allocated $100 million, builder program which was allocated $300 million and investment & incubation program which was allocated $500 million.
According to a Twitter trend breakdown of the fund by the Binance Smart Chain account, it stated;
Talent Development, which was allocated 10% of the total fund is to “raise a generation of crypto-native talent that will spread across the industry and push blockchain adoption forward.”
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Liquidity Incentive Program, which was also allocated 10% of the total fund is to, “encourage participation from traditional financial markets and crypto.”
Builder & Incubation Program, which was allocated 30% of the fund is to, “expand MVB and incubate 100 innovative DApps, boost infrastructure providers building on top of BSC, and help BSC DApps provide attractive bug bounties to bolster their security.”
Investment and Incubation Program, which was allocated a lion share of the fund, standing at 50%, is to, “accelerate mainstream adoption and to bring disruption to financial infrastructures. This fund will be utilized to grow decentralized computing, gaming, metaverse, virtual reality, artificial intelligence, and financial services.”
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The BSC Ecosystem
This is not the first time Binance is launching a growth fund as the platform had invested $100 million a little over a year ago when the Binance Smart Chain mainnet launched. The fund then was used to, “support DApps building on BSC.”
Since the launch of the $100 million fund, BSC has gained a great amount of traction as one of the more successful “Ethereum killers.”
According to data from BscScan, there are about 98.9 million unique addresses on BSC as of October 10, with a daily transaction number of nearly 6.3 million. As a comparison, there were a total number of nearly 172 million unique addresses on Ethereum on the same day with about 1.1 million daily transactions based on data from Etherscan.
BSC has faced criticism for being less decentralized and secure than some of its competitors as it is controlled by only 21 node operators. Asides from this, there has been a growing number of exploits on DeFi projects built on BSC this year.
These issues have caused the performance of the BSC to slow down due to concerns from investors and traders around its security. However, BSC is still the #2 blockchain by total value locked (TVL). Data from DeFi Llama puts BSC’s TVL at $18.44 billion. This is far off its all-time TVL high reached in early May which stood at $32.4 billion.
Today this $1 billion growth fund, as the announcement highlighted, is to, “deliver a robust ecosystem for cross-chains and multi-chains to interoperate and work seamlessly while being cost-efficient.” It further stated, “We aim to introduce the decentralized world of gaming, social networking, financial service, and more to the general masses to spread awareness around WEB 3.0”
BNB, the native token of the BSC is currently trading $450, up 10% for the day, as of the time of this writing.