The Growth of Binance and Its Challenges

Despite the fact that the crypto market is bearish this year, Binance has been continuously growing. Binance is the biggest crypto exchange based on volume. This Malta-based company is expected to have around $1 billion in profits.

And that says a lot considering the market slump this year after regulatory changes happened in different parts of the world. And to put things into perspective, Coinbase simply has around $456 million expected by the end of the year. This large profit gap could’ve been the reason why Binance is looking to explore more than just the crypto exchange market.

Binance announced recently that it is going to launch a Binance Research which will investigate on upcoming tokens. It was announced that “Binance Research is a new pillar of the Binance ecosystem, focused on the creation of institutional-grade research reports with the aim of increasing transparency and improving the quality of information available within the crypto space”.

Binance has already reported two tokens one is GoChain and the other is LOOM. Loom is known for having the scaling solutions for the Ethereum blockchain while GoChain is an independent blockchain that is known to be interoperable with Ethereum.

However, in order to fully understand the capacity of the tokens, one must have some familiarity with the products. The good news is that the reports are made in order to make it possible for investors to have a technical understanding when it comes to tokens.

Challenges by Binance

Binance is also offering custodial services. However, it was reported that Bitmain, which is the world’s largest Bitcoin mining company and biggest ASIC chip producer decided to request a jury trial regarding the stolen funds in Bitmain’s Binance Wallet. Around over 617 BTC were stolen in April 2018. During this time, Bitcoin was trading just a bit below $9,000. However, the mining company hasn’t identified the one responsible for the hacking incident.

According to the Bitcoin mining company, the hacker accessed “a protected computer without authorization”. And by doing so, the company lost around $5 million. The lawsuit stated that “As part of the scheme to fraud and theft, John Doe also knowingly transferred the Bitcoin he/she stole from Bitmain’s custodial wallet to an account on the Bittrex Seattle-based trading platform. John Doe’s unauthorized access and scheme to defraud was across state lines and accomplished using the internet, which is used in interstate and foreign commerce and communications”.

And the worst part is that Bitmain claims that Through his unauthorized access to Bitmain’s digital wallet and market manipulations, John Doe was able to transfer or “sell” that MANA into Bitmain’s digital wallet at an artificially inflated set of prices that range between $0.1997 and $0.33953 per MANA. This represented a 70 to 192 percent increase over the market rate that MANA had been trading”.

Security is a Challenge

Security is a challenge today. In fact, around $800 million were lost from hacking incidents in the last year and a half. In fact, this is also the reason why institutional investors are also worried about joining the crypto market. There are a number of factors at play.