On July 2nd, it was announced that Ripple’s former Head of XRP Institutional Liquidity has left to join Binance as the head of Binance.US as their CEO. At the same time, Changpeng Zhao (CZ), the CEO of Binance, has announced that Binance will be rolling out their very own futures platform in the near future.
Catherine Coley, who has also worked at Silicon Valley Bank and Morgan Stnaley in their foreign exchange businesses, has worked at Ripple for a little over 2 years and will be in charge of Binance’s expansion into the States.
Binance announced earlier last month that their main platform would no longer be offered in the US as of September. Instead, they will be rolling out a separate platform that will be able to operate in the U.S. market while maintaining full regulatory compliance.
Binance’s CEO, Changpeng Zhao, has said of Foley:
“I am confident that with Coley’s leadership and Binance’s leading technology platform, Binance.US will be able to provide valuable services to the U.S. community.”
And Foley later added, “This is just the beginning of a long journey ahead, and I look forward to working with Binance as a partner to unlock more potential for the blockchain ecosystem here in the U.S.”
Binance has partnered with BAM Trading Services on Binance US, and it was BAM’s decision to hire Foley. The company is not very well known, but was established in California and currently operates as a money services business.
More Big Announcements
In addition to this new hiring announcement, Binance has also announced their intention to offer a futures trading platform. The platform will support the BTC/UTSDT pair with leverage of up to 20x.
The platform will eventually be able to support the trading of long and short contracts on a wider variety of crypto assets than just BTC. It seems like there are very few areas that Binance won’t get involved in, as their list of projects continues to expand.
This move seems to coincide well with the Chicago Mercantile Exchange Group reporting that open interest (a measure of the number of contracts currently outstanding) in BTC futures had hit an all-time high. There is currently no set launch date for the platform, but CZ hopes to have a simulation test version available in just a few weeks. In his presentation, he even displayed an actual screenshot of the working system, which is a positive sign.
One other project that Binance has underway is the launch of fiat-to-crypto exchanges worldwide. They have already launched in Uganda and Singapore, and will continue to open up these new “floodgates” of cash inflow to the crypto ecosystem over the next few months (and years).
In addition to all this, more trading pairs on Binance’s decentralized platform have been rolled out, and margin trading is currently being tested (with a July 11 expected rollout). Binance is essentially on an expansion rampage right now, which is encouraging considering the hack they suffered just a few months ago.