Analysts have predicted token launches of 10 projects that received Binance support

What’s new? A team of analysts led by Colin Wu has named ten projects backed by leading centralized crypto exchange (CEX) Binance that could issue their own tokens in the second half of this year. The list includes Babylon, Xterio, Movement, Tabi, Puffer, Solv, Zest, Zircuit, StakeStone, and Lorenzo.

Source: X.com

Project details. The venture capital arm of the crypto exchange Binance Labs announced its investment in Babylon in February 2024. The project offers an innovative solution for staking native bitcoins in blockchains with the Proof of Stake (PoS) consensus algorithm. This enables rewards without the use of intermediary services and BTC wrapping platforms while increasing the security of PoS blockchains and liquidity for bitcoin holders.

Babylon had already raised $18 million late last year led by Polychain and Hack VC, and in May this year, the project raised $70 million from investors led by Paradigm in its latest funding round. The round was the largest investment in the bitcoin ecosystem in recent times.

Last July, Binance invested $15 million in the Web 3.0 gaming platform Xterio. At the time, the project team noted that it would use the funds to further develop the game, integrate artificial intelligence technologies into its platform, and launch a token. Even before Binance’s investment, the project raised $40 million in a round led by the venture capital arm of the now-bankrupt FTX crypto exchange.

Movement Labs also received an undisclosed amount of investment from Binance in May this year, which was in addition to a $38 million Series A funding round led by Polychain Capital. The company is focused on developing the Layer 2 (L2) network Move based on the Ethereum blockchain using the Move programming language.

Movement Labs will use the funds raised from the exchange to expand its operations in APAC and promote the adoption of the Move language across blockchain ecosystems by offering open-source tools to enable rollups.

In May 2023, non-fungible token (NFT) marketplace Tabi, powered by the BNB Chain blockchain, raised $10 million in funding with participation from Binance Labs, Animoca Brands, HashKey Capital, and others. The funds raised were used to develop the ecosystem and create an identity protocol. A distinctive feature of Tabi is the function of converting users’ on-chain activity into points that can be used to participate in airdrops and receive rewards. Tabi offers NFT trading and startup platforms, as well as a gaming platform.

In January this year, Binance Labs invested an undisclosed amount in Puffer Finance, which is a decentralized open-source liquid restaking protocol that combines liquid staking on the Ethereum network and native restaking on the EigenLayer protocol. According to plans, the Puffer Finance team will launch its own native liquid restaking token (LRT) on Binance’s BNB Chain network, allowing users to earn rewards for participating in Ethereum staking.

Solv Protocol received a strategic investment from Binance Labs back in January 2022. It is a decentralized platform for creating, managing, and trading tokenized vouchers or “financial NFTs” based on the bitcoin blockchain. By May this year, the project had raised over 12 000 BTC on the Arbitrum, BNB Chain, and Merlin Chain blockchains, and added support for zkSync and Linea. In the future, the project plans to connect to the Babylon restaking protocol, among others.

In May of this year, Binance also received support for Zest Protocol, a Bitcoin blockchain-based open-source lending protocol that allows users to lend their bitcoin savings and receive interest for it, or lend an asset. The protocol includes two types of liquidity pools: earning pools, where users earn income from their BTC as liquidity providers, and borrowing pools, where users borrow against their BTC.

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In June this year, the exchange also invested in the L2 network Zircuit based on zero-knowledge proof (ZK) and artificial intelligence technologies. The network is compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) and offers secure and fast transactions.

At the time, Zircuit had over $3,5 billion in staked assets and its Build to Earn developer ecosystem program had attracted over 1100 applications. Ethena, Renzo, Ether.fi, KelpDAO, Elixir, Ambient, Pendle, and LayerZero are partners in the mainnet launch project, which is scheduled for this summer.

In March this year, Binance invested in infrastructure liquidity protocol StakeStone for ETH staking. The project aims to aggregate liquidity from different ecosystems. According to the developers, StakeStone is capable of integrating various sources of yield, including Ethereum staking, restaking, real-world assets (RWAs), as well as tokens from AI projects and decentralized physical infrastructure networks (DePINs).

Lorenzo Protocol, a Babylon-based decentralized liquid staking platform, received funding from Binance in October 2022.