Crypto exchange giant Binance today announced the launch of its staking platform. Binance will issue monthly rewards and distributions to those holding certain tokens on its platform.
Customers will receive rewards for staking tokens for the following projects: NEO, Ontology (ONT), VeChain (VTHO), Stellar (XLM), Komodo (KMD), Algorand (ALGO), Qtum (QTUM), and Stratis (STRAT).
Staking rewards are essentially just rewards for HODLing your crypto in a Binance wallet. Crypto rewards will take the form of, er, more crypto—a little like interest in a bank account. This gives Binancians an incentive to hold their funds in Binance.
For staking, there will be no minimum staking amounts or time lengths, and users won’t have to set up any nodes. Come October 1, Binance will take a snapshot of the network every hour to calculate a snapshot of each day.
There are, however, “holding” amounts. To start receiving staking rewards on Algorand, for instance, you’d need to hold 2 ALGO. Luckily, the price of the ALGO has tanked, so that’s only around $0.34.
Tezos is notably absent from the launch. Binance’s CEO Changpeng Zhao hinted that users could earn rewards for staking Tezos earlier this week. A user asked CZ if Binance would offer staking rewards for Tezos, and the cryptic crypto CEO replied with a single laughing emoji.