A report on Sina tells the story of Binance, revealing how the 6-month-old exchange acquire 6 million users and currently the #1 cryptoassets exchange in terms of volume. Binance was founded by Zhao Changpeng in August 2017. The startup exchange issue 200 million BNB tokens to raise much-needed funds. The report attributed the rapid growth of Binance to ICO backing, the “September Ban in China” and the rise of “BNB” tokens.
On August 22, 2017, Sun Yuchen did a live broadcast with the He Yi ,founder of Binance as a road show for TRON, the new project initiated by Sun. As they are very popular among the young people, thousands of audience watched the live streaming. The ICO of TRON was kicked off at noon on the same day, 500 million TRON tokens were sold out in 53 seconds. As the first ICO project, TRX has injected much confidence and enthusiasm for both startups.

He Yi, Founder of Binance, on live broadcast

Later, TRX has been the star project of Binance. A series of marketing event have been planned to boost transaction volume of TRX. Top traders are rewarded with luxury cars like Maserati or Mercedes-Benz or Apple’s iPhone X and other items. Such was the common practice in China’s live broadcasting business: to reward followers with expensive items to retain their attention. Similar marketing campaign has been practiced when promoting VEN.

On 4 September, 2017, the “ICO Ban” rules has been jointly released by 7 authorities in China and later all bitcoin exchanges were asked to shut down. Binance is the only exchange that is not affected as it’s based outside China. Users switched to Binance to continue their 24-7 trading. But according to Binance, Chinese users only account for 3% of entire user base.
The rise of BNB token also helps Binance to climb up to the top of crypto exchanges.
Binance announced the issuance of BNB to collect much-needed funds for the startup. 50% or 100 million ERC20 tokens were sold at around 1 CNY at ICO, which is around $12.93, ranking #30 as of 29 January 2018. The huge reward has attracted more investors to catch the train.

Later, the exchange-based tokens are adopted by many other exchanges like Huobipro and OKEx. Such tokens could mostly be used for

Exchange fees
Withdraw fees
Listing fees
Any other fee

All indicators of growth are going crazy. On January 17, Binance announced that registered users have exceeded 6 million with 250,000 daily additions. On 8 January, Binance have to suspend new user registration and switch to random opening. With 6 million users, the trading volume has exceeded 3 billion USD on 18 December 2017 and 10 billion on 10 January, 2018.

According to the latest weekly report of Binance:

Binance remained steadily as the No.1 Exchange by 24-Hour Trading Volume.

But the lack of fiats trading pairs means that Binance is not included in the futures index of CME.

Also the exchange-based coins are being questioned by some well-known crypto traders like AlbertTheKing:

“All of these tokens issued by exchanges are not shares of exchanges and not entitled to receive dividends or vote. They are just digital assets that are different from shares. Pricing of such tokens are completely subject to the manipulation of these exchanges. Secondly, such tokens are no longer scarce when every exchange are issuing tokens. It is not even worthwhile to day-trade them.”