Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange by trading volume, is publicly testing its new decentralized exchange DEX before it officially opens, and has strategized a trading contest to entice more of the public to try it out. 

Binance CEO Changpeng “CZ” Zhao tweeted (Feb 28): “To test the hell out of @Binance_DEX, we are giving away roughly $100,000 USD equivalent, in REAL $BNB, as reward for our testnet trading competition.”

Participants need only have at least one BNB token in their Binance account to join, and may register up to 20 Binance Chain addresses. Each address will receive 200 virtual testnet BNB tokens as a starter fund in the simulated trading competition starting later this week on Thursday (Mar 7).

There will be two different competitions, said the exchange, with prizes for both awarded in BNB. One is the “Token Competition for Healthy Price Volatility” for participants to compete in listing and issuing tokens on the testnet. The other, named “Absolute Return Competition”, will rank all participants according to the absolute returns they accumulate with their trading strategies on different assets over the competition period.

DEX has been open for public testing since February 20, where users can create wallets and interact with the platform. At the time, Binance also revealed the blockchain explorer for the testnet called Binance Chain, allowing DEX traders to be individual nodes, and hold their own private keys to their crypto assets.