Death of Coinbase? Binance to Introduce Euro Trading Pairs This Year
Crypto exchange giant Binance might take cryptocurrencies to a whole new level this year, bringing them a bit closer to the mainstream financial market. Changpeng Zhao, the Chief Executive Officer of the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, said in an interview with Bloomberg on June 8, 2018, that the exchange would soon offer Euro-crypto trading pairs.
Binance and Malta
Binance plans to implement this revolutionary change later this year from its new operational headquarters in Malta. As reported by BTCManager, Binance announced the relocation of its base of operations to Malta in March, due to the stiffening of regulations concerning crypto-asset exchanges in Japan.
Japan is not the only country that has limited crypto exchanges. China shut them down completely, while the U.S. made their operations extremely difficult. With many other states following suit, increasingly more other crypto exchanges (such as OKEx) are either planning or announcing their move to this potential blockchain haven.
Both the Maltese Prime Minister Joseph Muscat and Changpeng Zhao have indirectly expressed their awareness of this, and PM Muscat took to Twitter to welcome Binance to Malta.
“Malta is very progressive when it comes to crypto and fintech,” Zhao told Bloomberg in March 2018.
Fiat Enters a Crypto Only World
This groundbreaking move is excellent news for crypto-users living in the EU, as this will make it possible for them to convert their digital tokens into a fiat currency.
Zhao said that Binance would also add other fiat pairs, but he did not specify when exactly this will happen or which other fiat currencies customers will be able to convert their bitcoin, ether and other tokens into.
Although exciting, this announcement is not the first one of its kind in the recent months. Another leading exchange, U.S.-based Bittrex, announced less than two weeks ago that it had made banking agreements that will introduce BTC-USD trading for some of their clients.
Bittrex, headquartered in Seattle, Washington, also plans to expand their service to all retail customers.
Binance’s move is nevertheless innovative as most of the popular virtual currency exchanges only offer crypto-to-crypto trading. Although the advantage of this trading is that it is not subject to as much regulatory monitoring as other types, it, on the other hand, restricts the clients who seek to cash out their digital tokens.
Introducing a fiat currency trade is Binance’s first step in attempting to increase and intensify its growth.
Binance was founded in August 2017 by Zhao and has already significantly profited from the cryptocurrency rush of 2017, becoming the world’s largest cryptocurrency platform by traded volume in December 2017. Additionally, the exchange reported billions of dollars in revenue for the first quarter of 2018.
However, the head of Binance Labs, Ella Zhang, who joined in March 2018, is not as optimistic about the volatile cryptocurrency market as one would think. She claims that the cryptocurrency bubble might burst soon, but also says that this does not necessarily mean a bad thing, as the “truly good projects” emerge only after the “unreasonable” possibility of high-returns bursts.
Zhao also told Bloomberg that his growing company now has nine million users, compared with more than two million at the beginning of 2018.
As announced by the exchange’s CEO, Binance should also receive an exchange license from Jersey in the Channel Islands and plans to open an office there which would employ around 100 people.
