Binance Invests in Chinese Crypto Data Startup
In its drive to expansion, Binance joined the funding round for Mars Finance, a cryptocurrency data website.
Binance expands its influence as an angel investor, participating in yet another strategic round. This time, Binance participated in a round giving Mars Finance a $200 million valuation, reported Bloomberg.
This is one of the first direct investments of Binance in China. Curiously, the co-founder of Mars Finance is none other than Jihan Wu, co-founder of Bitmain. Wu has been missing from the crypto space for months, after Bitmain started to post disappointing quarterly results and saw the planned IPO for the company fail.
The other co-founder of Mars Finance is Wang Feng. The Mars Finance site is one of the leading news sources in Chinese, covering the booming interest in crypto assets in the country. The news outlet, potentially competing with other news sources, was established in 2018.
China remains one of the hotbeds of crypto activity, ranging from mining to highly active trading. But analysts note a rift between crypto news coverage, thus leaving multiple large-scale Chinese projects largely unknown to Western audiences. One such example was the Plus Token scheme, one of the largest scams in 2019.
Binance is currently going through a highly active period of growth, with multiple projects and announcements. The exchange awaits its next IEO, Band Protocol, which is currently in the token sale session phase.
Binance also announced the recent addition of margin trading pairs for Cosmos (ATOM). The asset was one of the exceptional performers among altcoins, recently breaking out from lows and growing by 60% against BTC lows.
ATOM is currently trading at $3.24, sliding around 4.5% in the past day, taking a break from the growth of the past few days. Despite the Binance effect, some of the assets carried by the exchange remain relatively volatile. Binance Coin (BNB) retreated in the past few days, standing at $20.68, with a loss of around 7% in the past week.