The Binance and BNB chains were paused, and this was confirmed by the official Twitter account for the BNB chain. Approximately 2 million BNB tokens worth $600 million were stolen, so the chains were shut down. It is very easy to shut down a binance smart contract because it is one of the most centralized cryptocurrencies and exchanges in crypto.
As of Nov. 2018, there were only 21 validators (known as Authority Nodes) participating in the Binance Chain’s consensus protocol, which is based on the proof-of-stake authority consensus algorithm. This makes Binance Chain one of the most centralized public blockchains from its launch date.
Massari’s initial token allocation, binance has 50 initial token allocation to VC and insiders. I don’t think smart chains and BNB are going away but I do think there is a benefit to having VC money backing an ecosystem. I also think Binance is the number one Exchange in the world but that doesn’t mean BNB will make it to the next Bullrun, however l wouldn’t put my life savings in BNB, and I wouldn’t want to spend money using BNB. But as I’m drafting this article, it has fallen 3.5%.
I expected it to be a little higher, maybe it will go down even further from here. This is not a good thing to see, but let’s be honest–the market isn’t likely to care as much as we’d like it to. The markets don’t care that much about centralization unfortunately; I’m not here to say how things should be, I just acknowledge the way they are.
There are some people who think that this is the end of Binance and that it’s a worthless token, but I don’t think it is. There will be more bullruns in the future and this might be an opportunity for those who missed out on previous ones to get involved with BNB. But again, this is just my opinion–I’ve been wrong before too.
Should I continue to use binance?
Yes, I think so. I’m not sure if they’ll be able to recover from this hack or not but there is a lot of support behind Binance and I have confidence that they will come out on top in the end.
The bottom line is that Binance is likely to recover from this hack and continue operating in the future. It will take some time for them, but I don’t see a need for users to abandon the exchange now. The keynote here is that you shouldn’t store your funds on an exchange, especially if you’re not actively trading it. Remember that exchanges are custodial services–your coins aren’t actually yours until you move them into a secure wallet.
