Binance Announces Singapore Expansion, Details Around DEX Launch and Wallet

The China-based crypto exchange giant Binance has announced that it will launch Binance Singapore this month, a fiat-to-crypto exchange with support for the Singaporean Dollar (SGD).

Binance offered few details in the Twitter announcement except for the explicit confirmation that the exchange will be operational within a matter of weeks.

This news has been in the making for several months. At an event in Singapore in September 2018, Binance’s founder and CEO, Zhao Changpeng, reportedly discussed potential plans for opening an exchange in the country, and he confirmed these plans via Medium the following month.

This move continues a trend at Binance of expanding internationally across multiple continents. In 2018, for example, Binance sought expansion in Malta and South Korea. In January 2019, a British expansion allowed users all over the European Union to access the exchange’s services.

And this was not the only announcement that Binance made on April 3. The company tweeted that its upcoming decentralized exchange service, Binance DEX, is scheduled to have its mainnet launch this month as well.

This service, as described in a company press release, is Binance’s attempt to create what Zhao called “a decentralized exchange with a decentralized network of nodes, where you hold your own private keys and manage your own wallet.”

The feature runs using Binance Chain, a blockchain developed by the company and its community members. From what the developers have teased so far, Binance DEX’s user interface is very similar to that of Binance’s existing exchanges.

Finally, Binance also described some planned functionality updates to its wallet software. Binance’s Trust Wallet is going to include a staking feature, which “involves the act of holding cryptocurrencies as part of the process of running blockchains that use [a] Proof-of-Stake consensus mechanism,” giving users “the ability to vote on changes in the blockchain and receive income for validating transactions.”