DISCLAIMER: I own some BNB, so my thoughts might be biased.
Binance: the future of crypto exchange
There are a lot of scams going on with ICO and digital tokens without proper regulation and investor protection. I consider two aspects - acceptability and real-life use case - of altcoins before investing in them.
Binance is one of the first exchanges to list NEO (Antshares) and NEO GAS. The exchange rewards NEO GAS for the NEO holders as if traders have their NEO in personal wallet. I met Binance when trading NEO GAS. It is a neat and user-friendly platform. Here's some info about the exchange and its token, BNB.
- First, it has a real product that people use (I first of course used the exchange and bought its token)
- It is run by known and experienced people in crypto and fintech community (having affiliation with OKcoin, Bloomberg, JP Morgan, blockchain.info, etc.)
- It doesn't trade CNY or any fiat currency reducing probable regulatory problems in the future. Given the team members' face value they aren't likely to run away with investors' money. If Binance as a company continues to do well, no one would have incentive to cheat.
- Coins or tokens have to meet certain requirements in order to be listed in the exchange which should give traders (who don't study internals of coins) some comfort.
- Binance has an excellent revenue model to create demand for BNB (discounts if fees are paid in BNB, listing fees, etc.)
Binance's performance in just a month after launch
Binance was launched on July 14th, 2015. The exchange is in coinmarket cap's top 10 exchanges by 24 hour volume. The exchange covers 180 countries with 120,000 users with more 50% user being active on a daily basis. It has so far English, Chinese, Korean, Japanese language support. I haven't tried Binance mobile app, but according to users in bitcointalk and reddit, the mobile app too is excellent.
Binance announced that it got Venture Capital funding from Blackhole Capital and Funcity Capital. It also ended its promotional zero-fee trading; now users pay trading fee, deposits and withdrawals fees. Who wouldn't want to pay in BNB and get 50% discount? These are all good news. Still, BNB price is falling, steeper after publication of news.
According to coinmarketcap, the exchange's 24 hour volume is $89,979,384 (20,039 BTC). If this volume stays the same for a year, BNB will have a demand of 89979384 * 0.00005 * 365 or roughly $1.64m just for trading fees alone. 200 million BNB tokens have been created at at current price, BNB market cap is $300 million.
Every quarter, Binance will use 20% of their profits to buy back BNB and destroy them, until we buy 50% of all the BNB (100MM), leaving 100 million in existence.
Could Binance team itself be manipulating the price so they can buy cheap BNB in the future (for burning 100m tokens). I also don't find a reason they would want to keep price down because the team own most of the tokens. Or it's big players, whales, who just pump and dump. If you see reasons BNB might fail, let me know in the comment. Gotta get out of it
Reference
https://www.binance.com/resources/ico/Binance_WhitePaper_en.pdf
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2080842.0
https://www.reddit.com/r/binance/