Binance, the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange by daily volume, said on Saturday that it had 200 million global users. No other exchange has nearly as many users. However, these data are self-reported.
Binance marked the occasion on its social media platforms, portraying the 200 million user milestone as a step toward the company's goal of onboarding a billion, or one in every eight persons on the planet. Binance has 130 million users in 2022, 40 million in 2023, and at least 30 million more by mid-2024, with the potential to reach 300 million by 2026 if current trends continue.
Binance’s 200 million user milestone comes on the heels of another cryptocurrency industry record for the company. The company's legal difficulties are mostly in the past. With founder and former CEO Changpeng "CZ" Zhao currently serving a four-month sentence on fraud charges, Binance appears to have emerged unscathed
Base Network's TVL Reaches $8 Billion Following Overtaking of OP Mainnet
The total value locked (TVL) on the Ethereum layer-2 network Base has topped $8 billion days after surpassing Optimism's OP Mainnet. According to L2Beat data, its TVL as of June 10 was $8.05 billion, which included $2.14 billion in canonically bridged value assets locked on Ethereum and represented on Base, as well as $5.92 billion in natively created assets.
The Coinbase-supported chain surpassed OP Mainnet as the largest chain within the Superchain ecosystem last week and is now the second-largest Ethereum scaler in TVL, trailing Arbitrum One’s $18.27 billion. Base reached the $1 billion TVL threshold on February 27, roughly seven months after its inception in August 2023.
Base has earned the largest on-chain earnings in the last three months, including a record $16.9 million in March, according to a Dune Analytics dashboard by niftytable. According to researchers at asset manager VanEck, the combined market capitalization of Ethereum layer-2 scaling networks is likely to reach $1 trillion by 2023.
South Korea Classifies Mass-Produced NFTs as Virtual Assets
South Korea's Financial Services Commission (FSC) has issued guidelines defining whether nonfungible tokens (NFTs) can be recognized as virtual assets. On June 10, local media site News1 claimed that the FSC will regulate NFTs similarly to crypto if they don’t possess traits that differentiate them from virtual assets.
NFTs that have very little or no value will be handled differently. This is true for NFTs used for digital certificates or those used in ticketing. In these circumstances, they are considered general NFTs. Jeon Yo-seop, the FSC's Financial Innovation Planning Director, stated that large NFT collections are highly likely to be used as payment.
In 2023, the FSC declared that virtual assets must earn income by July when funds are deposited into a cryptocurrency exchange. However, the regulator did clarify that ordinary NFTs and central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) are not covered by the regulation. NFTs used as payment and issued in bulk can earn interest.
