Binance is a cryptocurrency exchange that was founded in 2017 by Chinese-Canadian developer, Changpeng Zhao (aka CZ). Zhao’s company Beijie Technology created the exchange after a successful ICO that raised $15 million. Having originally been based in China, Binance moved headquarters to the Cayman Islands following the Chinese government’s increasing regulation of the cryptocurrency industry.

Investors who invested in Binance’s ICO got Binance Coin (BNB) in return, which could be used to trade cryptocurrencies and pay for fees on Binance. BNB is now also used to power BNB Chain, formerly known as Binance Smart Chain. BNB’s initial value was around $0.1, and has continued to appreciate with the rise of Binance and BNB chain.

Some of the main features of Binance are:

* P2P trading: A very neat feature, Binance provides a peer-to-peer (P2P) trading service, which connects buyers and sellers of cryptocurrency directly. This facilitates fiat payments, with a wide variety of payment options that depend on the users’ preferences

* Crypto Loans Binance Loans offers loans to users in a variety of tokens, collateralized with some of the more popular tokens like, BTC, ETH and ADA. This provides an easy way to get your hands on stablecoins like USDT, BUSD or USDC, while maintaining exposure to your cryptocurrency holdings and avoiding the taxable event of selling crypto.

* Binance Futures and Derivatives Binance Futures, which was launched in 2019, enables traders to speculate on the price of (rather than purchase and sell) Bitcoin and various popular cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin Cash, Ethereum, Litecoin, Ripple and more. The platform allows leveraged trading of up to 20x, which means that traders can multiply their profits (but also losses) by 20 times. Binance Futures balances are held separately from users’ regular trading accounts and must be funded with Tether (USDT) as collateral. All profits and losses will also be realized in USDT.

* Savings Binance Savings allows users to make a return on idle funds, through “flexible” or “locked” account types. Flexible savings accounts yield variable interest rates, while locked savings accounts pay higher interest on fixed-term deposits.

* Staking Binance also provides a staking service, which allows users to earn returns on proof-of-stake and decentralized finance (DeFi) coins, without needing the technical knowledge to stake the coins themselves. Similar to the savings accounts, the staking service is available in flexible and locked options.


* Binance Visa Card The Binance Visa Card allows users to spend their cryptocurrency holdings in places that only accept fiat currency via credit or debit card. Behind the scenes, your crypto holdings will be converted to fiat when you make a purchase (with zero fees), so that you don’t have to hold fiat on-hand. The card is completely free with no admin or processing fees and lets you earn up to 8% cashback on eligible purchases.

* Binance Liquid Swap Binance Liquid Swap is an automated market-maker (AMM) platform, similar to Uniswap, and is based on a pool of liquidity. There are two tokens in each pool, and the relative amount of tokens determines the price between them. Liquid Swap offers more stable prices and lower fees for large transactions. Users can trade coins on Liquid swap with minimal slippage, or provide their liquidity in return for a share of fees. The key difference between Binance Liquid Swap and Uniswap is that Liquid Swap is centralized.