Happy Friday! Binance Bytes is an initiative by the Research team to provide a quick round-up of the week.

Highlights 🧵:

1/ Binance has introduced "Binance Pre-Market," a new service that allows users to trade tokens before their official spot market listing. This innovative feature, jointly launched by Binance Spot and Binance Launchpool, enables users to either divest their Launchpool rewards or acquire tokens in advance. The first Pre-Market project will be announced soon, offering early market entry and additional utilities for Launchpool participants. Users can benefit from early market movements without incurring any additional fees beyond the standard Binance spot trading fees.

2/ Ethena has announced the launch of a new stablecoin, UStb, which will invest its reserves in BlackRock’s USD Institutional Digital Liquidity Fund (BUIDL). This marks Ethena's second stablecoin, following the earlier release of USDe, a synthetic stablecoin. UStb is designed to support USDe during volatile market conditions by allowing Ethena’s governance to reallocate assets to UStb, thereby managing risk more effectively.

3/ In contrast to PYUSD's sharp 30% drop in market cap this week, PayPal has announced that U.S. merchants can now buy, hold, and sell cryptocurrency directly from their PayPal business accounts, although this functionality is not available in New York State at launch. This new feature aims to increase cryptocurrency utility for millions of U.S. merchants. Additionally, PayPal business account holders can now transfer cryptocurrency externally to third-party eligible wallets. This move follows PayPal's previous initiatives, including the launch of PayPal USD (PYUSD) and its integration into the Xoom platform and the Solana blockchain, further expanding the company's cryptocurrency offerings.