Even though the valuation of all the cryptocurrencies combined fell by circa $8 billion on Monday, Binance Coin (BNB) emerged as a winner.
As of 1332 UTC, the ninth-largest crypto was trading at $24.81, up 1.68 percent into the day. It nevertheless did better against bitcoin, rising 5.17 percent to 0.0025 BTC as the latter corrected to lower $9,800s a day after breaking above $10,000. Elsewhere in the market, other altcoins – barring Tron’s TRX – noted a similar price drop.
Binance Coin surged impressively against Bitcoin on an otherwise bearish day | Source: TradingView.com, Binance
BNB’s move uphill in both the dollar- and bitcoin-denominated markets added more than $200 million to its market cap. Meanwhile, it also brought BNB’s year to date gains up by 34.13 percent, signaling an overall optimistic buying trend in the market.
‘Futures’ Saves the Day
BNB’s jump occurred despite a wider intraday bearish sentiment in the cryptocurrency market. So it appears, the move closely followed the launch of BNB-linked futures contracts on Binance Futures on February 10. The digital asset derivatives platform had announced the launch late last week.
“We’ve introduced 16 altcoins to our platform as of today and have seen excellent growth in our altcoin trading volume, with some pairs quickly taking the number one spot in the futures market,” said Aaron Gong, Director of Binance Futures, adding:
“The BNB contract has been a highly-demanded product and will continue to grow the industry impact of Binance Futures trading platform.”
The service went live at 0800 UTC, leading speculators to believe that it would somewhat help increase the prices of BNB in the spot markets. That partly explains why the coin surged impressively even though its correlated rivals, including Bitcoin, fell.
Binance’s Corporate Expansion
Meanwhile, traders also assessed the possibility of Binance foraying into the cloud computing industry. Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao announced on February 7 that they would launch a new service, titled Binance Cloud. But the entrepreneur avoided giving any further details, only stating that he wishes to see the platform as “more of an infrastructure provider.”
People hold BNB because it’s scarce by Binance’s business model. The digital asset exchange periodically burns part of their profits (in BNB). At the same time, Binance ensures that BNB’s demand always goes up by letting traders use it as a reward/monetary token on its platform.
— CZ Binance 🔶🔶🔶 (@cz_binance) February 7, 2020
Binance Cloud, albeit with its unclear business model, tends to conduct finances via BNB, thereby raising the use-case against a dwindling supply rate.
That leaves Binance Coin is a very bullish state for the year 2020.