When the market slows, Binance is doubling down.
In an interview with CoinDesk, Catherine Chen, Binance’s head of VIP and Institutional, laid out an ambitious roadmap aimed at growing the exchange’s active user base tenfold to 3 billion by 2030 — even as the crypto industry grapples with a prolonged downturn and competitors retrench.
“It is true, the market is going through a hard time,” Chen told CoinDesk, noting a wave of regulatory developments and rivals “either struggling or perhaps shifting their focus.” Coinbase, for example, cut roughly 14% of its workforce — nearly 700 employees — earlier this year amid soft market conditions and competition from AI-driven innovations, part of broader industry layoffs.
Market backdrop and Binance’s position
Bitcoin remains below the symbolic $100,000 level it hasn’t seen since mid-November, and the broader crypto market cap sits around $2.7 trillion — roughly 40% below its pre–October flash crash peak of $4.38 trillion. Yet Binance says it is weathering the slump. Chen reports the exchange serves more than 310 million “actual active individual users,” a figure she emphasizes is based on stringent KYC and corporate KYB verification, not simple registrations.
Binance is widely regarded as the largest crypto exchange by trading volume and registered users, though CoinGecko currently ranks it second by daily trading volume at about $7 billion.
Institutional push: closing the infrastructure gap
Chen framed the current pullback as an opportunity to build the institutional plumbing crypto has long lacked. She highlights a stark spending imbalance: traditional finance firms invest north of $2 billion annually in advanced order management systems (OMS), while crypto infrastructure spend is roughly $185 million — less than a tenth. Binance’s new OMS toolkit aims to close that gap by bundling institutional-grade flow analytics and execution tools through partnerships with Coin Metrics, Talos, and 3Commas.
“Financial institutions are increasingly merging with crypto exchanges and blockchain infrastructure providers,” Chen said. “They don't want to be building all that infrastructure themselves.”
Triparty framework and tokenized real-world assets
Beyond trading systems, Binance is tackling a core institutional pain point: custody and counterparty risk. Institutional clients often don’t want to custody crypto themselves or leave capital sitting on an exchange; they prefer to hold fiat or fiat-equivalents with established banking partners. To address that, Binance has quietly integrated “triparty” workflows and sovereign-grade asset management rails that accept tokenized money market funds from BlackRock and Franklin Templeton as eligible collateral inside its triparty ecosystem.
This lets institutional traders pledge yield-bearing, tokenized shares in real time — avoiding manual treasury rollovers and heavy admin fees — effectively using tokenized short-term funds to back trading operations. Chen expects tokenization of real-world assets (RWA) to accelerate over the next 12–18 months, arguing tokenization improves accessibility without changing an asset’s fundamental characteristics or price.
Crypto-as-a-Service and client traction
Binance also launched a Crypto-as-a-Service (CaaS) platform in September aimed at financial institutions exploring digital assets. Chen says more than 15 major financial institutions have engaged the service since the rollout.
The build-through-the-downturn strategy
Chen’s message is pragmatic: while retail-driven price moves command headlines, Binance is focused on long-term infrastructure and institutional adoption. “Whenever the market is bad, it is always the best time for us to build,” she said. “We are building and positioning ourselves to 10x our user base when people aren't noticing — and then, hopefully, we are already there.”
Whether Binance’s bet on institutional tooling, triparty custody, and RWA tokenization will prove decisive remains to be seen, but the exchange is clearly positioning itself to capture the next wave of crypto growth — not by chasing short-term rallies, but by building the plumbing institutions say they need.
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