The crypto market is struggling, competitors are falling on hard times or pivoting to other areas, while Binance prepares to grow its active user base tenfold to 3 billion by 2030, Catherine Chen, head of VIP and institutions, told CoinDesk in an interview.
“It’s true, the market is going through a tough time,” Chen said. “There are still some regulatory developments, we see some of our competitors either struggling or perhaps changing direction.”
Coinbase, for example, recently reduced its workforce by 14%, or nearly 700 employees, citing negative market conditions as well as AI challenges, part of a wave of crypto employee layoffs this year.
As BTC faces resistance to reclaim the psychological six-figure mark above $100,000, a level it has not seen since mid-November, the market as a whole is looking for drivers of sustainable growth beyond retail speculation. The total crypto market cap hovered around $2.7 trillion, down nearly 40% from its all-time high of $4.38 trillion before the October flash crash, from which bitcoin has not recovered.
Chen said Binance’s position remains strong despite the market downturn, noting that the exchange currently serves more than 310 million active users. She emphasized that these were “genuine active individual users”, verified via strict corporate KYC and KYB protocols, and not just “registered” accounts, she said. Binance is considered the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the world, dominating the market in terms of trading volume and registered users. Coingecko ranks Binance second with an average daily trading volume of around $7 billion.
Closing the $2 billion institutional spending gap
Chen talks about a digital asset market that is growing so significantly and with such enormous potential that only collaboration between traditional finance (TradFi) and native cryptocurrency will allow both parties to become winners in the future.
Binance is addressing the huge spending disparity between traditional and digital asset offices, Chen said. She noted that TradFi spends more than $2 billion annually on advanced order management systems (OMS). In crypto, infrastructure spending is less than a tenth of that amount, at around $185 million.
Binance’s newOMS toolkit is designed to fill this exact gap, partnering with industry stalwarts such as Coin Metrics, Talos and 3Commas to provide institutional-grade flow analytics, Chen said.
“Financial institutions are increasingly merging with crypto exchanges and blockchain infrastructure providers,” Chen said. “They don’t want to build all this infrastructure themselves. »
Pledging Wall Street assets on crypto rails
This convergence went beyond the framework of theoretical trading and focused on the heart of institutional conservation. So while the market monitors retail trends, Chen noted, Binance has deployed a “tripartite” institutional banking framework designed to mitigate TradFi’s ultimate problem, counterparty risk.
Institutional clients do not want to hold crypto directly or leave their capital on exchanges, Chen added. Instead, they want to keep fiat or equivalent currencies with their existing banking partners.
To address this issue, Binance has quietly integrated itself into sovereign-grade asset management, Chen said, adding that the crypto exchange now accepts tokenized money market funds from institutional giants BlackRock and Franklin Templeton as eligible tri-party ecosystems.
Instead of manually launching Treasury futures contracts and incurring heavy administrative fees, institutional traders can now commit to real-time, yield-bearing tokenized stocks to support their trading operations.
“Whether it’s equity, cash or debt, this is the way to go,” notes Chen, pointing to a 12-18 month time horizon where tokenization of real-world assets (RWA) matures quickly. “People have finally understood that you don’t magically change the fundamental characteristics or price of an asset by tokenizing it. It’s fundamentally an improved form to ensure better accessibility.”
Binance also recently rolled out its Crypto-as-a-Service (CaaS) platform designed exclusively for financial institutions looking to get involved in the digital assets sector in September last year, Chen recalled. Since then, she added, more than 15 major financial institutions have used their services.
“Whenever the market is bad, it’s always the best time to build,” Chen says. “We’re building and positioning ourselves to 10x our user base when people don’t notice – and then, hopefully, we’re already there.”
