Binance remains profitable despite crypto winter, CFO says

The world’s largest digital currency exchange, Binance, has remained profitable despite the challenging market conditions in the past year.

2018 saw cryptocurrency prices plummeting, with Bitcoin (BTC), the most popular digital currency, dropping more than 80% from its December 2017 all-time high. Other digital coins saw similar, or even greater declines last year. However, Binance has managed to remain profitable in the wake of the so called ‘crypto winter’, the company’s chief financial officer Wei Zhou has recently revealed.

“To date, even in this bear market, we still run a profitable business,” Zhou said in an interview with CNBC on Wednesday.

Binance doesn’t disclose its financial results publicly, so media outlets have been trying to estimate the company’s performance on publicly available metrics, CNBC notes. Industry website The Block recently suggested that Binance made $446 million in 2018. This estimate is based on an analysis of how much it spent to buy back Binance Coin (BNB) tokens, using net profits.

Binance is the largest digital currency exchange, as measured by trading volume. The exchange processes around $500 million worth of crypto trades on a daily basis. Its most popular offering is the BTC/UDST trading pair. The BitTorrent Token (BTT), Ethereum (ETH), Lirecoin (LTC) and Ripple (XRP) are also among the coins that are most traded on the platform.

Earlier this week, Binance’s chief executive officer Changpeng Zhao announced that the firm would launch a testnet version of its decentralised crypto trading platform later this month.

“Targeting to release Binance Chain testnet (@binance_dex) for public testing on Feb 20th. This is a testnet, your feedback would be most valuable,” Zhao posted on Twitter.

Binance DEX will be running on the company’s proprietary blockchain, Binance Chain. Binance will charge a flat fee of 0.01 BNB for transfers on Binance Chain.