The world’s leading cryptocurrency exchange – Binance – expects net profits to reach up to $1 billion this year according to founder and CEO Zhao Changpeng.

Talking today to Bloomberg, the Chinese billionaire was confident about the exchange’s profitabiity for this year, after he said the company recorded a $300 million revenue for the first half of 2018.

Expecting total net profits for the year to be between $500 million and $1 billion, Binance is now back at the top of the exchange volume rankings – processing over $1.2bn of trades in the last 24-hours – following several days where it was knocked off the top spot by the new “trans-fee mining” exchanges.

Offering compensation for most or all of a user’s cryptocurrency fees in the exchanges own tokens, these new platforms such as CoinEx and Coinbene have enjoyed astonishingly high 24-hour trading volumes – often over $2bn.

Overcoming Challenges

With Changpeng highly critical of this new model of exchange revenue, this latest incursion into Binance’s territory has not been the only problem for the world-leader of late.

Earlier this week the exchange had to halt trading after very suspicious activity surrounding Syscoin (SYS) on its platform. With the lesser-known coin experiencing huge jumps in price – at one point being bought for 96 BTC (around $640,000 at the time) per coin – the exchange was forced to stop trading.

Binance have since responded to the incident by launching a security fund – the Secure Asset Fund for Users (SAFU) – and will allocate 10% of trading funds to protect users from such extreme situations on the exchange.

With many in the crypto industry looking to Binance as the industry leader, Changpeng’s forecasts today make it clear the company does not consider these latest developments to be long-term challenges.