The world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, Binance, has announced it has joined the European association representing international blockchain industry participants and also seeks to advocate for balanced policy and regulatory governance at the EU-level, Blockchain for Europe.

Its membership sees Binance U.K. Director Teana Baker-Taylor being appointed to the association’s board, alongside representatives from Fetch.ai, Ripple, Block.one, and Blockseed Ventures. They join other industry experts and stakeholders in collaborating for blockchain in Europe and contributing to educate and support European policymakers as they evaluate the future potential opportunities for the new technology.

Some of the areas in which Blockchain for Europe and its members are currently focused on responding to include the EU Action Plan on AML public consultation, the Digital Services Act (DSA) consultation on Smart Contracts, and contributing to ongoing discussions on the proposed EU Framework for Markets in Crypto-assets consultation conducted in December 2019.

The exchange, which recently made it to the CB Insight Fintech 250: The Top Fintech Companies Of 2020 (companies which have raised approximately $49.2 bln in aggregate funding across nearly 900 deals since 2015), also made a disclosure regarding its platform’s performance in August.

Its August Trading Report shows that its market share in the altcoin futures space grew to 41% and stabilized in the range of 35-40% towards the month-end – marking one of its highest single-day altcoin futures volume on August 14th with over $5.8 bln traded.

This is in addition to the exchange reporting that open interest on its platform crossed $1 bln for the first time since its inception as Bitcoin, despite its volume dominance decline throughout the month, surged in price and attempted to break above $12,400 at the beginning of August. It stabilized at an average daily open interest of $950 mln in August, a 35% increase over July’s $700 mln.

The rise in trading activity in August also saw volume on Binance Futures increased by 79% month-on-month to $195 bln, its highest monthly volume since inception, the report states.

Binance Smart Chain Mainnet Launchhttps://t.co/AN5RY8lAKk pic.twitter.com/OtrWztKOAD

— Binance DEX (@Binance_DEX) September 1, 2020

The exchange had this week launched its Binance Smart Chain as a parallel chain to Binance Chain to enable smart contracts. It adopts Ontology’s decentralized identity solution which seeks to make it easier and more secure for crypto holders and traders to manage and exchange digital assets. The solution is similar to what the EU’s Open Banking initiative is bringing to traditional finance in that it helps connect users’ assets to their identity, providing increased security and trust to all parties, connecting the missing pieces of decentralized finance’s ecosystem.

The high ETH network gas fees is causing problems for most exchanges, running with $10-20 loss on each withdrawal.

Will have to adjust our withdrawal fees sooner or later. 😂

— CZ Binance (@cz_binance) September 1, 2020

Binance announced the addition of decentralized finance (DeFi) Composite Index Futures as DeFi continued its parabolic run in August with a Total Value Locked (TVL) in the ecosystem surpassing $9.5 bln as at this writing. Though, as Ethereum’s booming DeFi ecosystem has been projected to continue its growth, there have been concerns over the recent rise in gas prices to an high that hasn’t been seen since 2017.

Attributed to the hype trailing the DeFi craze which has drawn more users to the Ethereum network like in the ICO days of 2017, the need to curtail the rising fees as the network awaits its switch to Ethereum 2.0 has become topical with some saying it stands to either drive users elsewhere or cause developers to start building scalability solutions for the platform.