2019 has been a big year for the overall cryptocurrency markets, which has led to big investments in developing new products and resources for the top exchanges. It seems, however, that these new advancements aren’t doing enough to justify a boost in the value of their native exchange tokens.
Two of these major exchanges, Binance and Bitfinex, have seen their exchange tokens suffering in value against the dollar and Bitcoin (BTC) in the past few months, despite considerably positive advancements in their respective camps.
Binance Coin on Ice
Binance Coin (BNB) is a token which can be purchased and traded for on the Binance cryptocurrency exchange. Its primary use in the Binance ecosystem is to pay for fees on trades — users receive a 25% discount when using BNB.
Binance has rapidly increased its use cases for BNB this year. In early June it introduced the option to use BNB to book flights and hotels on the TravelByBit online platform. Online shoppers can also earn BNB rewards when making purchases at over 1,200 merchants on the Bitcoin Rewards network. At the end of May Binance rolled out margin trading options and recently included margin lending products to its platform.
BNB surprised many by being one of the best performing cryptocurrency assets during the bear market of 2018 and surpasses its previous all-time high of $25 in May of this year before continuing to climb to a new high of $40 in mid-June. Since reaching its new high and all the developments coming out for Binance, BNB has still slipped 45% and is currently trading for $22.25 per coin.
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Bitfinex’s LEO Heading Back to Bottom
Bitfinex’s LEO Heading Back to BottomIn May of this year, Bitfinex released its own exchange utility token called UNUS SED LEO to raise funds, initially issuing one billion tokens selling for approximately one dollar each. LEO’s utility is similar to BNB in that it allows users a 15% taker fee reduction across all crypto-to-crypto pairs.
In June of this year, LEO tokens were trading for almost double the issuing price reaching $1.97 but has steadily sunk all the way back down to trading at just $1.14 at the time of writing.
The overall cryptocurrency market is showing bearish signs as of late, recently hitting a three-month low in terms of total market capitalization. Presumably, BNB and LEO are just following the negative trends affecting the rest of the market. However, for two major platforms offering assets with such clearly defined use cases, one would expect them to be a bit more resilient.
Do you believe BNB and LEO are still overvalued? Will exchange tokens play an important role in the overall market in the future? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.
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