Binance Tops Up SAFU Back to $1 Billion

Good news for Binance fans. The largest crypto exchange announced that it has refilled its Secure Asset Fund for Users (SAFU), which now holds $1 billion to be used as emergency insurance for users of the exchange.

The exchange previously topped up SAFU to $1 billion this January using a percentage of trading fees on the platform, but the fund suffered losses afterward due to the bear market. Now, however, the fund holds $700 million worth of Binance’s BNB token and its stablecoin BUSD, as well as $300 million worth of BTC.

Users were concerned about SAFU in light of Binance likely pouring money into the acquisition of another crypto exchange, FTX. According to Binance’s CEO, Changpeng Zhao, FTX turned to Binance for help with liquidity issues, which led to a letter of intent (LOI) outlining the acquisition.

The LOI is non-binding, meaning that Binance can still pull out of the deal. However, if it does go through, the crypto industry is looking at one of the biggest acquisition deals in its history.

Changpeng Zhao

As we wrote last week when reporting about the partnership between Binance and Ledger, the famous crypto exchange keeps striving to provide even better service across a variety of projects. Thanks to this partnership, it’s now possible for users to purchase crypto on Binance directly from one of Ledger’s hardware wallets, thus eliminating transfer fees.

Additionally, in late October, Binance introduced price oracles on its blockchain, BNB Chain. Such oracles make it possible for smart contracts to access the information not kept on the blockchain itself, leading to more efficient protocol operations.

As for FTX, the situation is obviously much worse. Its troubles began last week, when it was revealed that the native token FTT had been massively overvalued. This triggered many to liquidate their positions on FTX, including Binance which pulled almost $600 million. Following a few days of FTX’s CEO Sam Bankman-Fried claiming that everything was okay with FTX, the two exchanges started discussing the imminent acquisition. Seems like Binance will soon be larger than ever.