The cryptocurrency market is struggling, competitors are falling on hard times or pivoting to other areas, while Binance is building toward growing its active user base tenfold to 3 billion by 2030, Catherine Chen, head of VIP and Institutional, told CoinDesk in an interview.
“It’s true, the market is going through a difficult time,” Chen said. “There is still some regulatory development, we are seeing some of our competitors struggle or perhaps change their approach.”
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 regaining the psychological six-figure mark above $100,000, a level it hasn’t seen since mid-November, the broader market is looking for drivers of sustainable growth beyond retail speculation. The total cryptocurrency market capitalization was around $2.7 trillion, almost 40% less than 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 slowdown, noting that the exchange currently serves more than 310 million active users. He emphasized that these are “real active individual users”, verified through strict KYC and corporate KYB protocols, not just “registered” accounts, he clarified. Binance is considered the largest crypto exchange in the world and dominates the market in trading volume and registered users. Coingecko ranks Binance in second place with daily trading volume averaging approximately $7 billion.
Reduce 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 cryptocurrencies will make both parties winners in the future.
Binance is chasing the huge spending disparity between traditional and digital asset desks, Chen said. He noted that TradFi spends more than $2 billion a year on advanced order management systems (OMS). In crypto, infrastructure spending is less than a tenth of that, standing at around $185 million.
Binance’s new OMS toolkit is designed to close this exact gap, partnering with industry mainstays like 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 that infrastructure themselves.”
Pledge Wall Street Assets on Crypto Rails
This convergence has gone beyond theoretical trading and has reached the core of institutional custody. So while the market watches retail trends, Chen noted, Binance has implemented a “tri-party” institutional banking framework designed to alleviate TradFi’s main problem which is counterparty risk.
Institutional clients do not want to custody cryptocurrencies directly nor do they want to leave their capital on an exchange, Chen added. Instead, they want to custody fiat money or fiat money equivalents with their existing banking partners.
To solve this problem, Binance has quietly integrated with sovereign-grade asset management, Chen stated, adding that the crypto exchange now accepts tokenized money market funds from institutional giants BlackRock and Franklin Templeton as eligible three-party ecosystems.
Instead of manually rolling over Treasury futures and incurring high administrative fees, institutional traders can now pledge tokenized stocks that generate real-time returns to support their trading operations.
“Whether it’s equity, treasury or debt, this is the way to go,” Chen notes, pointing to a 12- to 18-month horizon in which real-world asset (RWA) tokenization matures rapidly. “People have finally discovered that you don’t magically change the fundamental characteristics or price of an asset by tokenizing it. It’s fundamentally an improved way to ensure better accessibility.”
Binance also recently launched its Crypto-as-a-Service (CaaS) platform designed exclusively for financial institutions looking to get involved in the digital asset sector in September last year, Chen recalled. Since then, he added, more than 15 major financial institutions have requested his services.
“Whenever the market is bad, it’s always the best time to build,” Chen says. “We’re building and positioning ourselves to grow our user base 10x when people don’t realize it, and hopefully we’re already there.”
