Binance Venus Aims to Outshine Libra and Chinese National Crypto?

Binance launches Venus to create localized stablecoins.

Despite the "Localized" approach, some members of the crypto community expect Binance's project to aim eastward, with the goal of claiming a stake in the Chinese payments market.

"It seems that those are some extremely optimistic goals for a crypto project. Binance is a pretty big deal in the crypto community but compared to Alibaba and Tencent they're smaller than ants. Let alone the Chinese government or their money. In fact, I'd be surprised to see any acknowledgement from Chinese authorities at this stage."

Twitter users commented that the project seemed to compete with Libra, with one user tweeting, "Binance is ready to dominate the world by launching project 'Venus' and rival Libra by developing localized stablecoins worldwide."

Although the Binance CEO might have mastery over his mild tone, it seems that the Chinese version of the Venus press release is a lot more passionate.

Dovey Wan, founding partner of Primitive Ventures and active commentator on crypto news, drew attention to a drastic change of message and tone between the Chinese- and English-language versions of Binance's project Venus press release.

Chinese central bank reacts to Libra - Venus up next?

While the Venus launch has yet to solicit a response from the Chinese government, it seems that Facebook's Libra project has really gotten under its skin.

Although work began on research and development for the digital currency back in 2018, a report from China Daily, a news portal owned by the Communist Party of China, revealed that Libra may result in Chinese regulators reconsidering the model of the central bank digital currency.

Yang Dong, the director of the Research Center of Finance Technology at Renmin University of China, told China Daily that Libra had ignited lively debate among regulators and sparked the need to diversify the project away from governmental institutions, stating that, "Further testing is needed before officially launching the Chinese CBDC, gaining inspiration from the Libra."