It doesn’t seem to take long these days for Binance to make headlines. But what a headline this is.
Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao announced on his Twitter this weekend that they plan on launching a decentralized exchange within a year:
Just had a productive meeting for #Binance #DEX (decentralized exchange), where $BNB will be native gas, and the exchange don’t control user funds. Aiming for a public beta end of the year/early next year. Yes, we work on Saturdays, non stop!
— CZ Binance (@cz_binance) September 29, 2018
Binance have invested in decentralized development hub Contentos to assist with the building of what would surely be their biggest project to date. What is interesting is that Contentos are already funded by NEO, highlighting their credibility and network.
Many important crypto thinkers in the space have lamented on decentralized exchanges being the ideal future of digital asset trading, meeting the criteria of the cypherpunk narrative, but there has been little tangible progress in their development. To date, only the exchange Crypto Bridge has seen any sort of significant user adoption. But with high latency, constant bug discoveries, and a hugely overwhelmed support team, they have shown that decentralized exchanges are still months if not years away from matching their centralized counterparts.
With the financial (and technical) support of Binance though, we could see a serious decentralized operation that runs at peak trading performance before the financial year is out.
What will be interesting to note is just what aspects and how much of this decentralized exchange is truly decentralized. What will the server structure look like? Will users control their own private keys? What will the asset listing process involve? All yet to be answered questions as we see this project develop.
It’s hard to determine from the outside if this highlights CZ’s desire for world domination in the digital asset exchange industry, or his desire to simply make the industry as robust and user-friendly as possible. World domination? Or world changer? Or a bit of both?
Either way, with Binance and CZ’s involvement, it is extremely likely that this product is going to be a serious contender among digital asset exchanges, if not an outright pioneer in the space.
