Binance launches $1 billion growth fund for Binance Smart Chain

Crypto exchange operator Binance announced Tuesday that it has launched a $1 billion fund for growing the Binance Smart Chain (BSC) ecosystem.

The massive fund is divided into four categories: Talent development, liquidity incentive program, builder program, and investment and incubation program.

The talent development program is worth $100 million and is aimed at mentoring developer communities, providing academic scholarships to institutions, and supporting research and development activities around crypto and blockchain.

The liquidity incentive program is also worth $100 million and will reward liquidity providers supporting decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols built on BSC.

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The builder program is worth higher at $300 million and is further divided into two sub-categories — $100 million for conducting hackathons, bug bounty and development programs, and $200 million for incubating 100 decentralized apps building on top of BSC.

The last program, the investment and incubation program, forms the larger chunk of the fund at $500 million. It aims to invest in startups across areas, including decentralized computing, gaming, metaverse, virtual reality, artificial intelligence, and blockchain-based financial services.

“BSC’s growth has attracted 100M+ DeFi users with just an initial funding of $100 million.” said Binance CEO Changpeng "CZ" Zhao. "With the new contribution of $1B, it can disrupt traditional finance and accelerate global mass adoption of digital assets to become the first-ever blockchain ecosystem with one billion users."

Earlier this year, Zhao told The Block in an interview that he's been focusing more and more on BSC, which he hopes to develop into a platform that resembles Ethereum. "We want to have like 20,000 or more active projects, real projects on BSC. That's kind of the minimum goal that we want to achieve over the next year or two," he said at the time.

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Yogita Khatri is a senior reporter at The Block, covering all things crypto. As one of the earliest team members, Yogita has played a pivotal role in breaking numerous stories, exclusives and scoops. With nearly 3,000 articles under her belt, Yogita holds the records as The Block's most-published and most-read author of all time. Prior to joining The Block, Yogita worked at crypto publication CoinDesk and The Economic Times, where she wrote on personal finance. To contact her, email: [email protected]. For her latest work, follow her on X @Yogita_Khatri5.