The Binance Launchpad experiment continues, as the Celer Network token sale concluded yesterday (March 19) within just 17 minutes. Celer (ticker name: CELR) is the third project to complete a funding on the venerable exchange’s new funding platform, behind the Bittorrent token (BTT) and Fetch.AI (FET) sales in late January and February, respectively.

The Celer Network is a second-level scaling platform, designed to process transactions off-chain for any other blockchain. The project already claim to support 10,000 transactions or operations per second.

Binance founder and CEO Changpeng Zhao (“CZ”) claimed on Twitter that CELR drew the highest demand among the projects so far funded via Launchpad. CELR sold a total of 597,014,925 tokens during the sale, worth nearly $4 million at the offering price.

CZ claimed that only about 8% of those who tried to buy the offered tokens were able to, or 3,129 individual accounts out of 39,000. He also cited some “technical issues” caused by the high demand, and said that Launchpad’s capacity to deal with high demand would “improve.”

ICO Redux

CryptoGlobe has noted the significant drop in the popularity and funding rates of ICOs, or Initial Coin Offerings, during the latter half of 2018. What was once a bonanza industry, fueling most of all the meteoric rise of Ethereum’s (ETH) price as the main vehicle for conducting ICOs – about 120x during all of 2017 – has withered along with the general pop in cryptoasset valuations in early 2018.

But in 2019, token offerings have been cautiously reappearing, often now in the form of STOs or Security Token Offerings. STOs have the advantage that they readily admit to being securities right out of the gate, avoiding the uncertainty of waiting for regulators in some countries to decide on which is which.

Binance seems intent on capturing some of this market as it returns to life – whenever that will be. Hosting the funding of new projects themselves, on their own exchange, Launchpad offerings can only be bought with the proprietary Binance Token, BNB.

The effects have been crystal clear. Since Binance began launches on Launchpad in January, the price of BNB has risen from about $6 to about $15 today – and in the process BNB has climbed as high as #7 on Coinmarketcap. At time of writing, BNB has a market capitalization of over $2 billion.

BNB(source: CryptoCompare)

In contrast, both BTT and FET tokens have done poorly after listing on the Binance exchange, following their respective launchpad offerings, with both BTT and FET down about 70% from their listing highs (see charts below).

BTT token(source: CryptoCompare)

FET token(source: CryptoCompare)