The Block: Binance CEO says there's pain and risk in the bear market, but also opportunity: Bloomberg

Binance could spend over $1 billion on investment deals by the end of the year.

Despite the market downturn, the exchange could spend a significant amount of cash on investments in the next three months, exchange CEO Changpeng Zhao told Bloomberg in an interview.

Beyond these investments, Binance has made investments in 67 projects, with a total investment of $325 million. Binance's VC arm has invested in various projects, including multiple investment in Aptos, the company founded by ex-Meta employees.

When asked about acquiring crypto lenders, Zhao said: “Many of them, they just take a user’s money and give it to somebody else. There’s not a lot of intrinsic value. In that case, what’s to acquire? We want to see real products that people use.”

We're likely to see more market consolidation, Zhao noted, concluding that “there’s a lot of risks and a lot of pain, but also a lot of opportunity."

On Thursday, an attempted hack almost drained $560 million in BNB tokens from the BSC Token Hub, the network's cross-chain bridge, with an estimated $100 million to $130 million successfully siphoned to other chains before the BNB Chain was halted for several hours — the blockchain restarted this morning.

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