Philip Maina
Poloniex, a reputable cryptocurrency exchange, has listed Binance Coin. This comes after Changpeng Zhao (CZ), Binance’s founder, criticized Tron’s founder, Justin Sun, over Steem’s leadership.
With Sun having a stake in Poloniex, it was likely that the criticism from CZ would influence the listing decision. Apart from BNB, the exchange has also listed the Binance stable coin (BUSD). Currently, BNB is paired with Tether (USDT), Bitcoin (BTC), and Tron (TRX) with BUSD trading against Bitcoin and Tether.
On CoinMarketCap (CMC), Binance Coin is among the top ten leading cryptocurrencies with a market capitalization of $2.8 billion. Its stable coin, on the other hand, occupies position three among leading stable coins and position 49 among top cryptocurrencies on CMC.
The listing seemingly clears the bad blood between Sun and CZ concerning Sun’s acquisition of a considerable chunk of Steem tokens. Steem is a blockchain-based social media and content platform. With a large number of tokens, the Steem community feared Sun would have the upper hand when deciding about governance on the platform. To express their dissatisfaction, the Steem community spearheaded a hard fork which was supported by Huobi and Binance, which are leading cryptocurrency exchanges. The hard fork saw the creation of the Hive blockchain.
Announcing support of the Hive blockchain in March, Binance noted:
“We will take a snapshot of all STEEM tokens held by Binance users at the time of the final Steem block… and will distribute HIVE tokens at a ratio of 1 STEEM = 1 HIVE.”
Initially, Huobi and Binance had supported Sun’s takeover plan, but after a backlash from the Steem community, CZ misguided into believing they were voting for scheduled upgrades.
On why they decided to conduct a hard fork, Hive noted:
“The intention of this community-driven fork is to support and build on the strong Steem community values that have made our ecosystem so diverse and exciting. This new direction steps away from the burden of the Steemit Inc. ninja-mined stake.”
