BINANCE COMMITS US$500m TO DEAL

Binance Holdings has committed US$500 million for Elon Musk’s proposed takeover of Twitter as part of its strategy to bring social media and news sites into the world of web3.

“We’re excited to be able to help Elon realise a new vision for Twitter,” said Changpeng Zhao, chief executive of Binance. “We hope to be able to play a role in bringing social media and web3 together and broadening the use and adoption of crypto and blockchain technology.”

The deal was part of the US$7.1 billion of new financing that Musk has secured for his proposed US$44 billion takeover of Twitter.

Binance was creating an internal team to focus on how blockchain could be helpful to Twitter and other social platforms, and had brought up BNB Chain

– a distributed ledger Binance helped to build – to Musk and his team, Patrick Hillmann, chief communications officer for Binance, said in an interview.

“This is probably one of the greatest laboratories that web3 has ever had access to,” he said.

BNB Chain is already used for decentralised finance and other applications and supports a token called BNB, which has a market capitalisation of about US$61.8 billion. Web3 is a catch-all term referring to a vision of the World Wide Web as a decentralised environment that uses blockchain technology and digital tokens to wrest control of the internet from giant technology companies.

Before the funding announcement, Zhao told Bloomberg TV that Binance was ready to invest in any “strong business with existing users, existing models” that could be helped with additional monetisation models using web3, blockchain and cryptocurrencies. Bloomberg