Major crypto exchange Binance has “softly, quietly launched Binance Pay” last Friday, currently in beta, said the CEO, discussing several other developing projects as well.
While it’s relative hidden now, “if you can find the product, you can try it,” joked CEO Changpeng “CZ” Zhao during the virtual Binance Blockchain Week, referring to the quiet launch of Binance Pay.
This is a basket product that the Binance plans to spend “a lot of effort on” this year, said CZ. While there is no announcement, the website’s support section states that “Binance Pay is a contactless, borderless and secure cryptocurrency payment technology [which] allows you to pay and get paid in crypto from your friends and family worldwide.”
It currently supports six currencies: binance coin (BNB), binance USD (BUSD), bitcoin (BTC), ethereum (ETH), swipe (SXP), and one fiat, EUR.
“We think that payments is one of the most obvious use cases for crypto,” CZ said. However, it’s much easier for merchants to accept cash and credit which people commonly use every day than currencies which the large majority of their customers do not use. “This way their business doesn’t have to fluctuate with crypto,” said CZ.
Meanwhile, users pay in crypto directly, allowing them “to stay completely in crypto,” he argued.
Per the website, users can receive or pay up to USD 10,000 (equivalent) or 10 transactions in 24 hours, while funds received in Binance Pay will only be available for transfer to other wallets after 24 hours.
Binance Card, which works on the same ‘user pays crypto, merchant receives fiat’ premise, is one of the projects in Binance Pay, the CEO stated, while they launched an app-to-app payment prototype as well.
“Binance Card is still going really strong,” he said, without providing numbers. Active Binance Card users are “growing really, really quickly […] at double-digit rates.” While all European customers can sign up for the card now, more markets are “launching very soon.”
The second to last update the CEO mentioned is that Binance launched the easy-to-use Lite mode in their app a while ago, geared towards new users “who may not be super-active traders,” CZ said, while users in the countries where it’s available can toggle between the Lite and the Pro version.
Lastly, Binance announced the 18th project on Binance Launchpad – SafePal (SFP) – which they said will follow a new Launchpad subscription format, with the recording of user BNB balances starting on February 2. CZ said that the exchange is a minority investor in the project, as it was a Binance Labs incubation project two years ago.
The new subscription format allows holders to commit an amount of BNB towards a token sale, said the exchange, “where their final allocation of the new token is determined by the ratio of their committed BNB against the total committed BNB by all participating users.” There is a max cap of token allocation per user.
Meanwhile, the exchange will launch a USDT-Margined Futures Taker Incentive Program on February 8.
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