Binance Coin (CRYPTO:BNB)

THE SQUID ELEVATOR

In the previous article, we defined decentralized finance, some of its strengths, and especially a major weakness: scams. A recent event illustrates perfectly the dangers that non cautious investors are exposed to.

You may have heard about the South Korean series squid game, (best launch on Netflix ever). Some malicious programmers had the idea to exploit this hype and build a project around a token on the Binance Smart Chain, named SQUID.

The project itself was useless, except for promising huge returns to investors (which is also possible with serious tokens!). What has been said, has been done. The token launched under 1cent, went up in November to more than 2800$! But then, many people realized that they were not able to sell (swap) the token. Indeed, in the smart contract, the developer had probably made sure that only his address was able to swap the token to collect the profits.

This he did a few times later, pocketing a fortune estimated at more than 3 million dollars, and drowning the value of the token with a 99.99% drop.

This bitter lesson will teach novice investors to never invest more than they are willing to lose, and to be extremely vigilant and critical (what is this project, who is the team behind it, what is the roadmap, etc...), especially with DeFi projects, which can go fast in one direction, but go back even faster in another.

NEW FUND FOR THE BINANCE SMART CHAIN

Last week, Binance struck a big blow, announcing the allocation of a fund of 1 billion dollars (10 times more than when it was launched) with the objective of expanding the range of applications offered by the BSC (DeFi, video games, social networking platform, nft, etc ...), and funding young new talents, about 500 million dollars will be distributed among these objectives. The remaining $500 million will be used to contribute to a more massive adoption of BSC and Decentralized Finance applications.

The Binance Smart Chain today has many DeFi projects materialized by their respective tokens and tradable on Dex, such as BUSD (the stablecoin USD issued by Binance), CAKE (token of the Dex pancakeSwap), or even wrapped versions of Bitcoin or Ethereum. The Binance Coin (which is the main token of the BSC, with which all gas fees are paid) is currently trading at around $489, with a 1500% increase since the beginning of the year. It ranks 4th in the crypto ranking, with a market cap of $82.20 billion, behind Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Hex (lesser-known but which we will talk about very soon).

As a reminder, to calculate the market cap at a certain time t, you take the circulating supply at time t (N), the price of the crypto at time t (x), and we get MC(t) = x(t) * N(t). No doubt that with this announcement, Binance shows us that the 4th place is not enough for them and that they plan to take off some new heights in the coming years.

BINANCE SMART CHAIN, A BLOCKCHAIN THAT IS ATTRACTING MORE AND MORE ATTENTION

Many people around the world have heard of the centralized exchange Binance, wich allows to store, buy and sell crypto-currencies and non fungible tokens.

Nevertheless, one of the most ambitious projects of the king of centralized exchanges is its blockchain: the Binance Smart Chain. Based on the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), the BSC allows users to use already existing applications (smart contracts) or to deploy their own.

One of the biggest advantages of using the BSC instead of the Ethereum blockchain lies in the use of Proof of Staked Authority. Unlike Proof of Work (used by Ethereum and Bitcoin among others), miners do not set the prices (gas fees) for which they will validate transactions. With Proof of Staked Authority (PoSA), cryptocurrency miners can mine or validate block transactions based on the amount of coins a miner holds. This has a significant impact on the costs that users will pay, especially for non-institutional investors.

Nevertheless, PoS brings an aspect of centralization that some might not appreciate so much in this decentralized universe.

If you were previously using Metamask to store your ETH and ERC-20, good news, the BSC network integrates easily with Metamask, and will allow you to take advantage of the BSC and its BEP-20 tokens without being out of touch. The mother token of the Binance Smart Chain is the Binance coin, which is currently trading at $480.