Binance, today, announced that ir burnt a huge sum amount of tokens. The mega cryptocurrency, in a media statement, said that “For our 13th quarterly BNB Burn (July to September 2020), Binance burned a total of 2,253,888 BNB, equivalent to $68 million USD worth of tokens. Binance CEO CZ also shared his thoughts on Binance Smart Chain and the emergence of DeFi”.
“Fellow Binancians,
For this past quarter, we just burned 2,253,021 BNB, plus 867 BNB from the Pioneer Burn Program, for a total of 2,253,888 BNB. This effectively took $68 million USD worth of BNB out of circulation forever. This is a healthy, steady increase for our BNB burn in USD terms, compared to the last quarter.
This 13th quarterly BNB burn is the highest-ever in fiat terms and fourth-highest in the amount of BNB burned,” the exchange added.
DeFi & CeFi
DeFi kicked into high gear in the last quarter. To a large extent, DeFi helped fuel the growth of our industry. Interestingly, it probably made crypto prices more resilient to negative news and FUD given the increasing amount of crypto locked in liquidity pools. Also in this quarter, we saw a number of bubble bursts, rug pulls, price drops, or however you like to call it. This is an important reminder that you need to be vigilant and learn to protect yourself at all times in a decentralized world. Always stay SAFU.
I was asked about DeFi during almost every single interview in the past quarter. I might as well summarize my thoughts here.
I believe many core innovations of DeFi will stay, including liquidity pools, AMMs, on-chain loans, etc. The high APY yields will not last that long. It will drop back to a reasonable double or single digit range over time.
In the long run, I believe DeFi will be the future, ie, overtaking CEX (centralized exchanges). But it won’t happen just yet, for a number of reasons. While the TVL (total value locked) on DeFi is high, the number of active users is still low. Not to mention, 99.9% of the world’s wealth is still in fiat, and we still need CEX fiat bridges to bring them into the crypto world (more on this later). And if we want true adoption, 99% of the mass population – the average users – are not technical enough to securely hold their own private keys given the tools we have today. More tooling needs to be built. And CEX is still easier to use for the majority of people, for now.
Saying the above often gives people the wrong impression that we are trying to hold on to our CEX. We are not. Even as one of the largest CEX in the world today, we view our CEX as a transient product. The future world will be decentralized, and we want to accelerate the pace of change. In fact, I personally am eagerly waiting for that day to come. I long for the day when we no longer need to hold custody of users’ assets, and become just a contributing member of a decentralized financial ecosystem.
To this end, Binance is one of the very few centralized exchanges that have contributed significant funding as well as development resources to DeFi (DEX and blockchains). Our team contributed to the development of Binance Chain and Binance Smart Chain, both of which are multi-year projects in collaboration with many independent developers and projects in the community. Luckily, as a result of these long-term investments, we are seeing these efforts bearing fruits.
