Binance Expecting Up To $1 Billion in Profits
While the rest of the cryptocurrency market is going experiencing billions of dollars’ worth of losses, Binance’s Chief Executive Officer Changpeng Zhao stated that he expects the exchange’s profits to be between $500 million and $1 billion for 2018.
Binance: A Thriving Crypto Exchange
Zhao, in an interview, said that the revenue the exchange generated $300 million. The CEO of the cryptocurrency exchange also stated that the daily turnover on average was about $1.5 billion. The exchange that was founded just one year ago in 2017 already has more than 10 million users.
At the beginning of 2018, Zhao had stated that the cryptocurrency exchange had just over 2 million users. He started this exchange in July of 2017, 11 days after he raised a little over $15 million via an ICO. Today, a year later, Binance is the world’s number one cryptocurrency exchange in terms of trading volume, currently topping the Coinmarketcap charts with a trading volume of $1.3 billion.
Despite the exchange’s run-ins with the Japanese and Hong Kong regulators, the crypto exchange has flourished. And now that Binance has relocated its headquarters to Malta, the cryptocurrency exchange plans to extend its venues to Bermuda and Uganda.
Competition between Crypto Exchanges
These figures show that the exchanges that trade in digital currencies are actually thriving. This is despite the fact that the price of Bitcoin has fallen more than 52% of its value so far this year and the rest of the cryptocurrency market is likewise declining.
Even the fact that exchanges have been targets of massive hack attacks doesn’t seem to have stopped users from trading in cryptocurrencies. So far, more than $731 million worth of cryptocurrencies stolen in 2018, vis-à-vis $266 million worth of cryptos in 2017.
Binance is not the only cryptocurrency exchange that is doing well to expand its frontiers. Major exchanges such as Huobi and Coinbase are also expanding their venues to include new locations.
Huobi, for example, just launched its services in Australia on July 5 and plans to commence trading from its London branch by the third quarter of this year. The exchange also plans to launch operations in the US, though it hasn’t given any fixed timelines for that yet.
Coinbase, on the other hand, is looking at expanding its operations to Japan and is also currently in the process of securing its banking license for the United States.