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Comment by leppr | Hacker News Reader

> it sort of crystallized an answer to a question I've had about Binance for quite a while: how did they manage to get so big, so fast. ...

No, Binance didn't get big because of Tether or leverage. It was already eating most of the crypto-only exchanges volume when altcoins were almost exclusively paired with BTC and before it acquired its perpetual futures business.

The main reason they managed to attract so many users is flamboyant altcoin pump and dumps orchestrated with ICO teams and Chinese whales, and pioneering exchange coins with the securities/utility token mash-up called BNB. Users came to chase the pumps, and stayed when they were invested in the platform itself.

Binance's thriving in its later phase even as Coinbase ramped up its altcoin listings can certainly be attributed to Tether though.

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Also Binance is quite simply a better exchange. It works flawlessly even when the market is hot. The quality of what they've developed and the speed at which they did it makes the average silicon valley team look like 7 year olds.

Most of what they developed is customization over white label solutions (that's how the main exchange was started), and acquisitions. The UI is a convoluted mash-up of different systems. Try using their margin trading. They're spending very little on in-house software development compared to their revenue and the average SV company of that size, and it shows.

> It works flawlessly even when the market is hot.

That's factually false. It holds up better than Coinbase sure, that's not hard, but it very frequently gets overwhelmed during volume spikes. The web UI and the various price feeds often fall behind. The orderbook feed falls out of sync even during normal usage hours. The more robust part of their stack, the trading API, rarely goes down though, I'll give you that.

I guess your comment makes my point about BNB. It's a great way to keep customers loyal and engaged. I do agree that overall it is the best cryptocurrency exchange, but let's not use HN as a shilling avenue.

Lol. I hold precisely 0 BNB, and never did. These guys are execution masters, and the proof is in the pudding.

Sure, praise for their business execution is warranted. It might even be allocating so little resources to the surface product (UI/UX) that's allowed them to move so fast in other more important avenues like liquidity, diversity of offerings and customer support.

1. I don't hold BNB.

2. I have had way less problems with Binance than Coinbase, so I am a happy Binance customer.

The bar is low with Coinbase, and I was replying to a specific unwarranted praise about Binance, already mentioning that it's indeed arguably the best exchange overall.

I think you can attribute a lot to the founders background. Previously he'd built trading systems for the Tokyo stock exchange, Bloomberg and

>In 2005, he moved to Shanghai where he founded Fusion Systems, known for "some of the fastest high-frequency trading systems for brokers." (wikipedia)

He presumably knew his stuff.

Sure would be nice if he applied his supposed trading systems expertise to Binance... quite ironic that his current exchange is one of the slowest on the market: https://latency.azidyn.com/

> and pioneering exchange coins with the securities/utility token mash-up called BNB.

To be fair there were other exchanges that tried this 'invest in the house' gambit, but Binance made it stick.

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