The goal is to accelerate growth for the Binance Smart Chain and drive mass adoption of crypto
Binance has announced a $1 billion fund targeted at promoting the adoption of the Binance Smart Chain (BSC) and the broader blockchain industry.
The crypto exchange believes the funding, with good partnerships encompassing industry-leading organisations, is going to significantly scale blockchain technology and see it adopted widely for real-life use cases.
Binance said in a press statement published on Tuesday that it wants to see the BSC ecosystem grow to encompass projects across decentralised finance (DeFi), gaming and social networking, among other sectors set to disrupt traditional systems.
Gwendolyn Regina, the Investment Director at Binance Smart Chain Accelerator Fund, said that the main goal of the fund is to accelerate the global adoption of cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology.
"With the $1 billion initiative, our focus will be widened to building cross-chain and multi-chain infrastructures integrated with different types of blockchains," Regina added.
According to Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao, "global mass adoption of digital assets" could see the Binance Smart Chain grow "to become the first-ever blockchain ecosystem with 1 billion users".
$1 billion, four programmes
Binance will split the $1 billion into four investment chunks.
A total of $100 million will go towards talent development, where beneficiaries will be developer communities, academic institutions and blockchain-focused R&D projects. The next chunk of investment also comprises $100 million, which will be put into a liquidity incentive programme to incentivise liquidity providers on BSC-hosted DeFi projects.
Binance has earmarked a further $300 million towards a builder programme, with $200 million of that put into an incubator project targeted for 100 decentralised applications (dApps). The remaining amount, $500 million, will go into an investment and incubation programme.
According to Binance, these funds are targeted towards accelerating mainstream adoption of DeFi and other sectors, including gaming, decentralized computing, metaverse, AI and virtual reality.
The $1 billion investment comes a little over a year after Binance dedicated $100 million towards projects in DeFi built on the exchange's BSC platform. Within this period, BSC has attracted more than 100 million users, Changpeng Zhao said in the press release.