Leading cryptocurrency exchange Binance announced that it will finance five decentralized finance projects that use its blockchain.
According to an October 29 announcement, Binance announced that the five projects will be supported by its $100 million accelerator fund for DeFi projects that leverage its smart contract-enabled blockchain Binance Smart Chain (BSC). With the first six projects financed by the exchange earlier this month, the total number of projects that the firm plans to fund has reached 11.
The first one of those projects is on-chain, non-fungible token auction platform Bounce, which features liquidity mining, governance and staking mechanisms. The second initiative on the list is a DeFi chart and analytics board for Binance Smart Chain decentralized applications (DApps) called DeFiStation.
Following that are open source blockchain project crowdfunding platform Gitcoin and a protocol that aims to prevent low liquidity and liquidity exits dubbed JustLiquidity. Lastly, the crypto exchange also decided to put funding into a project called PARSIQ which allows smart contract data and events to trigger on-chain actions in an “IFTTT” (If This Then That) fashion.
The $100 million accelerator fund is an initiative led by the exchange’s innovation arm Binance X, which oversees the project selection. The announcement clearly states that the firm wants more projects to join the 40 DApps that run on the Binance Smart Chain. In particular, the exchange is encouraging derivatives, prediction markets, and aggregators to leverage its blockchain and submit a funding application.
Binance wants a slice of the DeFi craze
After the token of DeFi project Yearn.Finance (YFI) became the first token ever to eclipse the price of Bitcoin (BTC) over the summer, many cryptocurrency firms have tried to capitalize on this new trend. As Modern Consensus reported on the last day of August, cryptocurrency exchange OKEx bet big on DeFi, announcing the listing of eight decentralized finance tokens—including YFI—in one single day.
Still, a nasty surprise may be coming for those who bet rely too heavily on DeFi’s success. The reason is that some suggest that the charges recently filed against crypto derivatives exchange BitMEX may foreshadow upcoming measures by U.S. regulators against DeFi platforms.