Binance Launches Public Testing for Decentralized Crypto Exchange

Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange by trading volume, has rolled out public testing for a decentralized trading platform built on its own blockchain network.

The company announced on Wednesday the new platform – called Binance DEX – is now up for public testing where users can create their own wallets and interact with the trading platform’s interface.

In addition, Binance revealed the blockchain explorer for the testnet of its proprietary public network called Binance Chain, which empowers the DEX so that traders can participate as individual nodes and hold their own private keys to their crypto assets.

While the launch of the testnet is a major step towards a final roll-out of the decentralized exchange, Binance said it now needs to gather feedback from the community before it can reveal a timeline for the final launch.

“With Binance DEX, we provide a different balance of security, freedom, and ease-of-use, where you take more responsibility and are in more control of personal assets,” said Binance’s co-founder and CEO Changpeng Zhao.

The company added that Trust Wallet, the blockchain startup Binance recently acquired, and hardware wallet maker Ledger, have already integrated with Binance DEX. Meanwhile, BNB, the ERC20-based token launched by the exchange, will be migrated to Binance Chain upon its final launch.

Binance first announced the plan to develop its own blockchain and a decentralized exchange in March 2018, after it kicked off its centralized spot-trading exchange Binance.com in mid-2017.

In today’s announcement, Zhao further boasted that Binance Chain has “near-instant transaction finality with one-second block time.” He added that such capability can potentially enable Binance DEX to handle the same volume Binance.com is handling today.

That said, Zhao also indicated on Twitter days ago that there will be a listing fee of around $100,000 for tokens to be listed on Binance DEX – a high entry bar he said was set to reduce the number of scam projects.

CZ image via CoinDesk archives.