Changpeng Zhao told people from a stage this week that Binance’s first fiat trading pair would involve support of the Russian ruble.
Binance to Support Ruble
.@cz_binance live from Open Innovations in Moscow, Russia ??https://t.co/MXQjsHwsex
— Binance (@binance) October 21, 2019
Zhao said:
“We’re adding support for fiat trading. In about two weeks or so, we should have support for Russian ruble trading, direct.”
The exchange has long had support for stablecoins such as USDT or TUSD, but now it’s adding in direct fiat integrations.
This will later mean integrations with the existing financial system, which recently expressed its fears through the mouths of government hacks in Washington, voicing concerns of Facebook’s Libra project.
Binance is currently expanding into the US and has existing regional operations, such as Binance Jersey.
Presumably, the Russian ruble integration is only the first fiat addition for the exchange, which is often the most active crypto exchange in the world by volume.
Relatively new, at an age of just about two years, Binance has quickly risen in prominence.
Binance: Rags to Riches
The exchange made waves and headlines earlier this year when it was hacked to the tune of 7000 BTC.
CEO Changpeng Zhao openly flirted with the idea of rewriting Bitcoin’s blockchain to thwart attackers.
This lead to a round of discussions around the basic rules of cryptocurrency.
During Zhao’s talk at Open Innovations in Moscow, he also spoke to the nature of cryptocurrency, speaking about the fixed supply of assets like Bitcoin.
Bitcoin’s supply cap will become an increasing object of discussion, with just 3 million coins remaining to be mined.
Binance has launched its own blockchain, which in part uses a sidechain on the Bitcoin network.
Reportedly, Binance has the biggest Bitcoin sidechain, at over 9,000 BTC. Binance Chain supports other projects, many of which are launched as IEOs on the exchange’s Launchpad program.
Binance came to life by offering its BNB token for sale during the 2017 ICO gold rush. The token’s only outward promise was that it would give discounts on the exchange.
The exchange product launched and gradually became a favorite of traders, having an array of assets outdoing even the likes of Poloniex along with competitive fee structures.
Since launch, the exchange has moved to Malta and done a number of other things, like introduce the ability for firms to have “trading desk” accounts. Thus, a master account can control a number of traders, who are free to trade and can have their funds controlled by the master account.
Binance has not mentioned when it or if it will be enabling support for other fiat currencies. For the present, most traders are fine using cryptocurrency-based stablecoins.
