SAN FRANCISCO—After being in business five weeks, Binance.US is looking to grease the hinges on its fiat-to-crypto gateway, making it even easier for people to start trading.
Today, the exchange, which debuted in September, will begin accepting debit cards for deposits. Binance.US claims to have done $14 million a day in trading volume over the past week, and the hope is that debit-card deposits will reduce roadblocks to onboarding and boost that figure even higher.
The exchange started with seven tokens, including Bitcoin, Ethereum, and its own Binance Coin. Over the last month, that number has swelled to 24, including NEO, ATOM, and WAVES, all of which were added this week. The total number of trading pairs is now 40.
Binance.US CEO Catherine Coley told Decrypt, “We’re really just trying to build out the comfort people are having and the ability for them to become actively trading on the platform. Having different coin pairs listed has been helpful.”
For the past month, Binance.US has mostly been relying on ACH and wire transfers to get new customers up and trading on its platform, with free introductory fees helping attract people to the fledgling exchange. Those fees will be going up today, though not by much. They are set to hit 0.1 percent per trade. All U.S. dollar deposits are also FDIC insured (up to $250,000) because they’re pooled into custodial bank accounts.
It’s all part of an aggressive strategy to make cryptocurrency trading mainstream in the U.S.—or at least in the 37 states where Binance.US is available. Coley told Decrypt she’s working on bringing in traders you might not find at San Francisco Blockchain Week, where today’s announcement was made: “Get more women, get different age groups, different backgrounds. A lot of people can trade crypto and have a day job.”
She said Binance has a chance of doing that because its “order books and layout have been popular among the world.” But, she said, Binance’s technology is “not super dumbed-down. It’s not super technical. It allows people to get in that sweet spot truly of how markets work.”
And the market seems to be favoring Binance.US at the moment.