Binance Unveils $1B Growth Fund to Supercharge Blockchain Adoption

Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, has allocated $1 billion in funding to a new growth fund that aims to kickstart the next phase of expansion for Binance Smart Chain (BSC).

According to the announcement, $100M will be earmarked for talent development to enable a “new generation of crypto-native professionals to push crypto adoption forward.” Another $100M will be used for liquidity incentives for the most active protocols on BSC. DERI Protocol and MCDEX will be pilot participants in the program.

“My understanding is BSC would like to position itself as THE ‘trading chain,’” 0xAlpha, founder of DERI Protocol, a decentralized derivatives platform, told The Defiant. “In other words, DeFi (especially the trading part) will be at the core of their strategy. And this does not just mean spot trading like PancakeSwap but more so derivatives, as they have referred to Advanced DeFi in today’s announcement.”

Most Valuable Builder

As for the rest of the money, $300M has been allocated to the expansion of BSC’s Most Valuable Builder (MVB) program, which provides DeFi projects with funding and guidance from industry professionals.

And $500M will be used for investments in “decentralized computing, gaming, metaverse, virtual reality, artificial intelligence, and financial services, which will not be limited to BSC but also support all the blockchain infrastructure.”

Launched in September 2020, BSC, an EVM-compatible blockchain, experienced explosive growth as the lure of cheap transactions and lucrative yield farming opportunities saw Total Value Locked (TVL) hit a peak of $32B in May 2021.

TVL on BSC has since remained steady at around $15B-$17B despite the summer sell-off and emergence of several competing blockchains offering low transaction fees. This indicates that BSC has managed to retain a substantial cohort of loyal users.

Network activity is picking up after a drop over the summer and the number of unique addresses using BSC has grown steadily to just under 100M.

Disclosure: The author holds BNB and DERI tokens.