Our Humble Beginnings

Six years ago, with your support, Binance raised $15M equivalent in crypto and started our journey as a crypto-to-crypto exchange. Two weeks later (6 years ago today), we launched Binance exchange with 5 tokens in 2 languages. We had to borrow a customer support team from my friend’s company, and we had no marketing team.

Today, Binance supports 600+ tokens in 40+ languages, with thousands of employees on our customer support team. The BNB chain now powers everything from decentralized exchanges to storage applications.

Two months after we started, came a decisive test of what we stood for. On Sept 4, 2017, China issued a ban on crypto exchanges and ICOs. ICO projects in China had to return the investments received to their investors. 

Many ICO token prices dropped due to this announcement. There were a few projects listed on Binance that dropped below their initial ICO prices, and the project teams didn’t have enough funds to make investors whole. 

Our team did some calculations and called me. They asked if we should use our own funds to make our users whole. The total cost would be $6M, which at the time was a huge sum. We all unanimously agreed. The call lasted for about 5 minutes while I was on a moving train. The announcements (link1, link2) went out a few minutes later. 

$6M was more than 40% of our treasury at the time, amounting to the largest single spend in Binance’s history by percent. We were not profitable back then, and were burning money as a 2-month-old startup, hiring people and buying servers, etc.

There were just two words in my mind: protect users.