Binance, one of the world’s largest third party cryptocurrency exchanges in terms of daily trading volumes, has just launched its much anticipated credit card facility. As is now clearly accessible via the main Binance homepage, users will have the ability to deposit funds using their personal credit card. Supporting both Visa and MasterCard, this is potentially huge news for the exchange, as users were previously only able to deposit funds with cryptocurrencies.
Although the platform was only launched in 2017, Binance quickly rose up the exchange rankings with its vast offering of alt coins. During the heights of the late crypto craze of 2017, the platform was comfortably experiencing daily trading volumes that surpassed the $1 billion mark.
Although these volumes have since cooled in response to the ongoing crypto bare market, Binance are still hosting volumes in the high-hundreds of millions. All of this has been achieved without any sort of relationship with real-world payment methods.
Are Binance Now Direct Competitors of Coinbase?
For those looking to get in to the cryptocurrency industry for the very first time, Coinbase are often the first name that springs to mind. The platform makes it super-easy to purchase tokens using a Visa or MasterCard, with transactions taking just a few seconds to complete. However, as Binance are hugely popular with high-frequency traders, it is entirely feasible that they might be able to obtain some of the ‘first time entrant’ segment.
In order to facilitate the depositing of funds via a credit card, Binance have partnered up with payment processor Simplex. It is important to note that whilst the Binance platform hosts more than 150 cryptocurrencies, credit card purchases can only be made to purchase Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin and Ripple.
Interestingly, whilst Bitcoin, Ethereum and Litecoin can all be purchased via Coinbase, Ripple is yet to be supported. Once again, this could bring a new wave of clientele to Binance’s doors. On top of the limitations of selected cryptocurrencies, only certain geographical locations will able to use their credit card for the time being.
Over in the United States, residents from Washington, Connecticut, Georgia, Hawaii, New Mexico and New York are all prohibited. In terms of processing fees, Binance will charge credit card users a fixed transaction fee of 3.5%. Whilst this is slightly cheaper than the fees charged by Coinbase, Binance users will need to wait between 10-30 minutes before they receive their coins.
The Binance Empire Continue to Grow in Size
According to well-known Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao, or simply ‘CZ’ as he is known within the cryptocurrency community, the expansion looks set to continue. CZ claims that Binance are in the process of opening 10 fiat exchanges in 2019 alone, covering two platforms per continent. CZ continued to add that they are looking to offer their services to the institutional space.
The launch of its credit card service is the second piece of major news to break from the Binance team in January. Earlier in the month, Binance announced the launch of its fiat exchange – Binance.je. The exchange facilitates the trading of major cryptocurrencies again both EUR and GBP. At the time of writing, this includes BTC/GBP, ETH/GBP, BTC/EUR and ETH/EUR. Further down the line, the Binance.je platform aims to add further currencies, as well as additional token pairings.
Ultimately, with Binance also waiting for approval to open the world’s first ever decentralized bank – the Founders Bank, it appears that there is no stopping CZ and his ever-growing empire.
