binance

The popular cryptocurrency exchange Binance announced that it registered a total of $446 million in profits in 2018.

During the last year, virtual currencies and the whole crypto market experienced a bear trend that affected several firms and companies in the space. Virtual currency exchanges have also been affected after this year. The information was released by The Block on February 5.

These numbers seem very positive considering that trading volumes substantially decreased during the last year. Back in July 2018, Changpeng Zhao, the CEO of Binance, mentioned that the exchange was going to register a net profit between $500 million and $1 billion during the year.

At the same time, when Binance registers net profits, it uses 20% of the funds to destroy BNB tokens. This reduces the BNB supply and allows the coin to increase its price. At the moment, the exchange has had six quarterly BNB burn, destroying around 10.8 million BNB.

The most profitable quarter registered by Binance was back in December 2017. At that time, it was able to register $200 million. Q4 2018 was the worst quarter for the exchange, registering a profit of $50 million. During the first two quarters of 2018, the exchange profits remained close to $150 million. In the third quarter of 2018, the profits dropped under $100 million for the first time since the third quarter of 2017.

Clearly, the decrease in profits can be explained by the overall bear market that is affecting the industry. The trading volume at the platform has been decreasing during the whole year as the price of virtual currencies continued to fall.

Binance launched two new fiat exchanges, one in Uganda and another one in Jersey. In Uganda, users can trade virtual currencies for Ugandan shilling and in the Jersey exchange, customers can use Euro (EUR) and British Pounds (GBP). Coinbase, another large digital currency exchange in the market, informed in October that they were going to be registering $456 million in profits in 2018.

In terms of trading volume, Binance wins against Coinbase. The number of users on the Binance platform could be related to the fact that Coinbase has higher fees than Binance.

At the time of writing this article, Binance is the largest digital currency exchange in terms of trading volume. According to CoinMarketCap, Binance registered $753 million in trading volume in the last 24 hours.

The most popular trading pairs at the exchange are BTC/USDT, BTT/USDT and BTT/BTC, accounting for more than 35% of the total trading volume at the platform.