Binance London Meetup Highlights

Find out what happened during the Binance London Meetup, our first meetup in the UK! Hint: It involves a lot of revelations from CZ and the Binance Jersey team.

On August 1, Binance held its first meetup in London, featuring the Binance Jersey team and a special AMA with Binance CEO CZ (Changpeng Zhao). More than 300 Londoners attended this event (plus an additional 300 on the waitlist), and we’d like to thank everyone who supported our meetup in one of the world’s main financial hubs.

AMA with CZ: Some of the Highlights

In an extensive AMA session moderated by Reuters journalist Ania Poullain-Majchrzak, CZ addressed several questions from the crowd, including prominent crypto reporters, traders and audience members from the UK and Europe. CZ’s AMA touched on a wide range of topics, such as Binance Jersey and other fiat channels, Binance DEX and decentralization, blockchain technology, token sales, and future Binance services.

Here are CZ’s responses to three of the questions asked during the AMA. Watch the full AMA here.

What are the future plans for Binance? Do you plan to launch other products, aside from Charity and Labs?

Right now, Binance Charity is doing quite well and is expanding aggressively. I think they’ve reached about 20,000 beneficiaries already (Editors’ note: over 30,000 end beneficiaries). Binance Labs is an investment arm, but we want to build out the [blockchain] infrastructure, and we have a very long-term vision. 

In addition, we’re launching quite a number of other things. Binance Jersey will ramp up its service in Europe. We just launched Margin [Trading]. We are about to launch Binance Futures, but before that, around mid-August, we’re going to launch Lending (don’t hold me to that though).

Instead of just Binance lending users [cryptocurrency] for Margin Trading, Binance users will be able to lend other users money for [many purposes, such as] trading on the margin platform. And you're going to be able to get the interest that the margin traders pay for that kind of loan. So we expect to bring a lot more custodians onto Binance.com.

Does Binance have an interest in listing Libra (Facebook’s proposed cryptocurrency) or supporting it? Do you think Libra is going to have a good or bad impact on the industry?

We don’t generally comment on specific coins, especially ones that haven’t come out yet, but one of our evaluation criteria is the number of users. As long as it’s not a fraud or a scam, we’re not against it. It’s likely that Libra, if it comes out, is going to have a decent number of users.

I personally think the more [projects] we have in the crypto space, the better. So I don't think Libra is a scam. I don't think Mark Zuckerberg is going to run away with a few billion dollars, he has more money than that. And the fact that they can bring so many users into the crypto industry, that's good [for the industry].

What kind of biology projects [are you interested in]? (referring to a previous comment where CZ mentions being interested in working more with biology projects 5-10 years down the road)

Today, we’re funding small projects for the blockchain space. I do believe blockchain fundraising is one of the biggest killer apps, because now we can fundraise around the world using cryptocurrency. That’s very fluid, very liquid. Once we are able to build the industry a bit more, let’s say a couple of years down the road––for example, Elon Musk is looking for funding to go to Mars. As a species, we don’t understand ourselves that well. There’s a lot of diseases we cannot cure, we don’t know how our bodies work to a large extent, we don’t know why we get a fever, for example.

I foresee a day where we can raise billions of dollars to say: hey, we’re going to run a biology project; we’re going to understand ourselves a little bit more. Hopefully one day, once our blockchain industry is strong enough, we can fund other industry projects. Biology, etymology, automotive, space travel. There’s many many interesting things to fund. Whereas our current financial infrastructure does not support that kind of funding. But I think, in 5 to 10 years, we will get there. I think those projects will be funded by cryptocurrency.

Binance Jersey: Lowest Fees Among EUR/GBP Fiat Exchange

Before CZ’s AMA, Binance Europe COO Mariana Gospodinova presented several very compelling cases for using Binance Jersey, the fiat-to-crypto exchange that uses Binance technology. 

Mariana described some of the main advantages of using Binance Jersey, including its robust matching engine similar to what’s provided on Binance.com, a faster payment mechanism where bank deposits are reflected for UK users within just 40 minutes (compared to 1-5 business days for other exchanges), and full regulatory authorization as the first fiat-to-crypto exchange to operate out of Jersey. She also presented a compelling comparison of Binance Jersey with some of the major competitors in the European market: Binance Jersey has lower deposit, withdrawal, and trading fees than seven of the biggest fiat-to-crypto exchanges in Europe. 

“These fees are not matched by anyone on the market yet. Same goes for deposits and withdrawals. You can just take your cash for free, you can deposit for free, and you can have the exact same experience as you can have with Binance.com,” said Mariana.

Once again, we thank all the people who attended the Binance London Meetup. For those on the waitlist who couldn’t make it, we hope to see you next time! We look forward to having more events in the city and the rest of the UK and Europe.