The crypto market is struggling, competitors are either going through hard times or pivoting to other areas, while Binance is building with eyes on increasing its active user base tenfold to 3 billion by 2030, Catherine Chen, the head of VIP and Institutional told CoinDesk in an interview.
“It’s true that the market is going through a tough time,” Chen said. “There is still regulatory development, we see some of our competitors either struggling or perhaps shifting their focus.”
Coinbase, for example, recently reduced its workforce by 14%, or nearly 700 employees, citing adverse 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 has not seen since mid-November, the broader market is looking for sustainable growth drivers 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 Flash crash in October, from which bitcoin has not recovered.
Chen said Binance’s position remains robust despite the market downturn, noting that the exchange currently serves more than 310 million active users. She emphasized that these are “actual active individual users” verified through strict KYC and corporate KYB protocols, not just “registered” accounts, she clarified. Binance is considered the largest crypto exchange in the world and dominates the market in trading volume and registered users. Coingecko ranks Binance second with a daily trading volume averaging around $7 billion.
Bridging 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 cooperation between traditional finance (TradFi) and native cryptocurrency will see both sides turn out to be winners in the future.
Binance is going after the massive spending gap between traditional and digital assets, Chen said. She noted that TradFi spends north of $2 billion annually on advanced order management systems (OMS). In crypto, infrastructure spending is less than a tenth of that at around $185 million.
Binance’s new OMS toolset is designed to bridge this exact gap by partnering with industry mainstays like Coin Metrics, Talos and 3Commas to deliver institutional-grade flow analysis, 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 moved past theoretical trading and into the central plumbing of institutional custody. So while the market watches for retail trends, Chen noted, Binance has rolled out an institutional “tri-party” banking framework designed to alleviate the ultimate TradFi pain point, which is counterparty risk.
Institutional clients do not want to hold crypto directly, nor do they want to leave their capital on an exchange, Chen added. Instead, they want to hold fiat or fiat equivalents with their existing banking partners.
To address this issue, Binance has been quietly integrating with premium asset management, Chen said, adding that the crypto exchange now accepts tokenized money market funds from institutional giants BlackRock and Franklin Templeton as qualified third-party ecosystems.
Instead of manually rolling Treasury futures and incurring large administrative fees, institutional traders can now pledge real-time, return-bearing tokenized shares to support their trading operations.
“Whether it’s equities, government bonds or debt, this is the way forward,” notes Chen, pointing to a 12-to-18-month horizon where real-world asset (RWA) tokenization is rapidly maturing. “People have finally figured out that you don’t magically change the fundamental properties or the price of an asset by tokenizing it. It’s basically an improved form of ensuring 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 last September, Chen recalled. Since then, she added, over 15 major financial institutions have sought her services.
“When the market is bad, that’s always the best time for us to build,” Chen says. “We’re building and positioning ourselves to 10 times our user base when people don’t notice — and then hopefully we’re already there.”
