The bear market has been a tough go for the crypto market as a whole. Many projects have struggled to stay above water. Binance Coin (BNB), however, has held up fairly well in comparison, especially lately.
Bear market beat down
Crypto's bear market has severely wounded most cryptocurrencies, with many assets down more than 90% since bull market highs. Even crypto's largest asset, bitcoin, saw a drop of more than 80%, as CNBC noted in November 2018.
BNB's strength
In contrast, Binance Coin has weathered the storm comparatively well. The token is now ranked eighth on CoinMarketCap in terms of overall market cap value. BNB comes in at $13.64 at the time of this writing, with a market cap of roughly $1.9 billion.
Currently, Binance Coin appears only to be down roughly 56% from its all-time high near $24.46. In fact, BNB actually is up almost 40% over the last seven days, according to CoinMarketCap.
Image Courtesy: Coinmarketcap.com (Binance Coin (BNB)
The Binance Launchpad
Crypto Bobby YouTube host Rob Paone pointed toward BNB token's recent success in a March 5 video, after the asset jumped noticeably in price.
Regarding BNB's recent moves, Paone noted a possible correlation to Binance Launchpad activity. "The launch of Binance Launchpad has somewhat recreated the ethereum ICO [initial coin offering] craze and a little bit of the ETH pump associated with that," Paone posited.
Binance described its Launchpad, stating, "The Binance Launchpad token launch platform helps blockchain projects raise funds and increase their reach across the crypto ecosystem." The exchange continued, "We do this by offering a project’s tokens to up to more than 10 million Binance users*. With this platform, we grant our users the chance to be part of potentially game-changing projects."
The Binance Launchpad notably hosted the BitTorrent (BTT) token sale this year which sold out in less than 20 minutes, according to a January 28 Crypto Insider article.
ICOs revitalized
Paone spoke on the notion that the ICO market looks to be lifeless right now. He referenced the 2017 ICO boom in which a vast number of projects raised millions of dollars in funds.
In terms of renewed enthusiasm, Paone said, "Binance has kind of kicked off this boom again." He did include the U.S. has cracked down on ICOs, noting that the Binance ICOs are not open to U.S. investors (as well as certain other locations).
Only via Binance Coin
Interestingly though, according to Paone, Binance accepts only BNB tokens for these ICOs, much in the same way investors put money into previous ICOs via ethereum during the last mentioned ICO craze.
Paone explained many previous ICOs ran on Ethereum's platform, with investors receiving ERC20 tokens in return for their ethereum investment. "Now, when you're investing on Binance, you can only pay for this with BNB," Paone said. "Because of the relationship between Binance Launchpad and the 6-7x [gains] that you saw with BitTorren, there is a high demand for these ICOs for a lot of these users." Paone related BNB's price spike with such related BNB token demand.
Paone included the potential for this situation possibly to recreate a version of the former eth-based ICO mania for a period of time.
Originally posted on Crypto Insider : https://cryptoinsider.com/binance-coin-shows-bear-market/