It’s been a long and brutal cryptocurrency bear market over the past several months. Now in its 13th month, it is the longest bear market in the cryptocurrency market history and still going strong. Several industry heavyweights have been humbled, while several others have decided to call it quits.
Bitmain, ShapeShift and Consensys among other notable names in the industry have been forced to downsize. Several ICO projects have had to close shop because their crowd funded entities have gone broke. It is a similar story across the industry.
However, not everyone is counting their loses. One of the leading cryptocurrency exchanges by daily adjusted trade volumes Binance is seating pretty as everyone else around them crumbles.
Now Binance is a private entity and does not share their financial books with the public but the nature of their business leaves room to speculators to estimate the condition of their business.
In its whitepaper, the ICO launched exchanged states that every quarter it will use 20% of its profits to buy back its own tokens in circulation and ‘burn’ them. So following up on their quarterly burns one can easily estimate their annual revenues and profits. And that is what the public has been doing.
Even though several members of the crypto community may be arithmetic lovers, they don’t have to use their skills anymore (for now) as the Chief Financial Officer (CFO) of Binance Wei Zhou was willing to offer some insider information about the financial position of his company.
In a recent interview with CNBC, Zhou declared “To date, even in this bear market, we still run a profitable business.” This confirmed all the views held by most Binance bulls out there.
In the summer of last year, as the effects of the bear market were beginning to be felt, Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao stated that his exchange was aiming at achieving profits in excess of $500 million and possibly close to $1 billion for the year 2018.
At the time, CZ revealed that Binance had made close to $300 million in profits in the first six months of 2018. Now, according to estimations, it is not hard to imagine that Binance achieved this target despite the protracted bear market.
Asked whether Binance could be considering going public, the recently hired CFO declared that this is not in the decks for the near future. Wei Zhou was brought on board back in September 2018 with background experience in both taking companies to initial public offerings and mergers and acquisitions. Even though it may not be any time soon, you cannot rule out the possibility of such a scenario.
