Binance Exchange Launches Payment App, Adds Merchant Feature

Binance, one of the world's largest cryptocurrency exchanges is further expanding into the payments sector, announcing on Friday the launch of Binance Pay which will allow fiat and crypto payments.

Binance initially rolled out Binance Pay in a soft launch in February 2021 for P2P payments, enabling 250,000 users to interact with the product. Today, Binance Pay is launching in alpha with new features like merchant-based transactions and is available to all users.

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Following a similar move from rival crypto trading platform Bitfinex earlier this month, Binance wrote, in a blog post that its travel bookings firm Travala had become the first merchant to incorporate its payment tool. It stated that all Binance.com account holders would be eligible to use the new service free of charge.

Binance Pay supports over 30 currencies and allows transactions using popular digital currencies like Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Binance Coin. But the feature most highlighted by the exchange is the ability to make global transactions without any fees. Merchant payments services like this generally allow businesses to automatically convert their crypto to fiat at the time of a transaction to counter price volatility

Founder and CEO Changpeng "CZ" Zhao said on Friday, “Traditional payment infrastructure services are riddled with high transaction fees; we see this Pay product as a way to solve one of the many issues and limitations of traditional finance. Finance is truly moving towards a digital world and economy where crypto is at the crux of this change which benefits the larger global population that needs it.”

Digital payments giant PayPal also announced in early February that the company is looking to offer crypto payments across its platform after debuting crypto trading in the United States in November 2020.