The next nine years: Binance's vision for the future of cryptocurrency and blockchain
By ChandlerZ, Foresight News
The first half of 2026 showed a rare split in the crypto market. Bitcoin has pulled back more than 35% from its high point, and DeFi's total hedging volume has dropped to $72 billion, and several crypto companies that originally planned to do an IPO have pressed the pause button. According to historical experience, these numbers usually herald the arrival of another cold winter.
However, in the same half year that prices have cooled down, another set of data has been accelerating. The US SEC and CFTC have concentrated on releasing signals about the direction of US crypto regulation. The new US SEC document clarifies that 16 types of crypto assets such as BTC and ETH are “digital goods”; the US Depository Trust Clearing Company (DTCC) promotes DTC tokenization services and collaborates with more than 50 financial institutions, including traditional financial and cryptographic institutions such as BlackRock, J.P. Morgan, Circle, Ondo Finance, and Robinhood; the total market value of stablecoins hit in May The all-time high of $322 billion surpassed the size of 95 countries' foreign exchange reserves; the number of global cryptocurrency holders reached about 700 million people.
Prices are shrinking and infrastructure is expanding. The reverse movement of the two lines may indicate that the industry is shifting from being driven by speculation to being driven by infrastructure.
Launched on July 14, 2017, Binance has accumulated more than 300 million registered users over nine years, operated under a license in more than 20 jurisdictions, experienced the largest regulatory penalties in the industry, and witnessed the entire process from ICO frenzy to institutional entry.At the time point of the ninth anniversary, the question that is more valuable than looking back at history is what direction did this company bet its resources in? What's the logic behind these judgments? To what extent can they represent the direction of the entire industry?
Where is the market for 3 billion people
Binance Co-CEO Richard Teng repeated the same number on multiple public occasions: 3 billion users in 2030. That target is ten times higher than the current 300 million registered users. According to Binance's growth curve, it reached 100 million users in the first five years, then reached 200 million in the next two years, surpassed 300 million in the last 18 months, and added more than 180,000 per day. Growth is accelerating, but going from 300 million to 3 billion still means finding a growth engine of a completely different magnitude.
Where this growth is coming from, Binance Research's July 2026 stablecoin report provides some clues. The report shows that in Binance's user base, 87% of fiat currencies need to pay a premium higher than the official exchange rate when exchanging stablecoins. This premium gradient accurately corresponds to the level of inflation. Users in hyperinflationary economies (over 10% inflation) pay an average of 62% of the premium, while high-inflation economies (over 5%) pay 27%, and 4% in a typical inflationary environment. The average premium for developed market users is only 0.3%.
What does a 62% premium mean? A user from Nigeria or Argentina is willing to pay 60% more than the official exchange rate in order to exchange local currency for stablecoins. The driving force behind this behavior is wealth preservation. In an environment where the currency continues to depreciate, stablecoins act as no-threshold dollar savings accounts, requiring no US bank account, no foreign exchange quota, and no minimum deposit.
Traditional fintechs (M-Pesa, Mercado Pago, etc.) also serve the financial needs of emerging markets, but they provide payments and transfers denominated in local currency. When users' core demands are to break away from the local currency and obtain dollar-denominated savings and earnings, cryptographic services provide products that cannot be replaced by traditional fintech, such as US dollar stablecoin savings, unintermediated cross-border transfers, and 24-hour uninterrupted liquidity.
Willing to pay a 62% premium to acquire an asset has nothing to do with speculation. In economies where currency depreciation, capital controls, and foreign exchange channels are limited, stablecoins actually act as borderless dollar savings accounts. The premium paid by users is the cost they incur to preserve their purchasing power.
Regional data confirms the scale of this demand. The share of stablecoin P2P transfers in Latin America and the Caribbean doubled from 17% to 38% in the past year, making it the fastest growing region. The Asia-Pacific region's on-chain value increased 69% year over year, and Latin America increased 63%. Globally, around 700 million people hold crypto assets, accounting for 8.5% of the world's population, with India leading with 156 million, Nigeria with 45 million, and Turkey's per capita penetration rate of 25.6%.
Whether the target of 3 billion users can be achieved still has many uncontrollable variables such as each country's regulatory policies, competitive patterns, and macroeconomic trends. However, at least from the demand side, a large number of people around the world still face problems of unstable local currency and insufficient financial service coverage. This base is large enough. In March 2026, the head of Binance's Asia Pacific region revealed in an exclusive interview with “Nikkei Asia” in Tokyo that Binance plans to add 5 new regulatory licenses in Asia within 2026 to prepare for this group of incremental users.
The premise behind the 3 billion user logic is that there are still a large number of people around the world whose basic financial needs are not being met by traditional systems, and cryptographic services are filling this gap. And to enter these markets, the first issue to be solved is compliance.
$4.3 billion purchase time window
In November 2023, Binance reached a settlement with the US Department of Justice to pay $4.3 billion in fines, and founder CZ stepped down as CEO. This is the largest regulatory penalty in the history of the crypto industry. The prevailing judgment at the time was that Binance's market position would be shaken as a result.
More than two years have passed, and the results are contrary to expectations. Binance currently operates under license in more than 20 jurisdictions around the world, spending more than $300 million on compliance each year, and has a compliance team of more than 1,500 people. Obtained ISO 22301 certification in March 2026. It already holds licenses from Australia, India, Indonesia, Japan, New Zealand, and Thailand in the Asia-Pacific region.
Binance's compliance transformation happened in a special industry time window. According to the Atlantic Council's “Cryptocurrency Regulatory Tracking Report,” only 42 countries around the world have enacted or are advancing crypto-specific legislation in 2024. By 2026, that number had grown to 68, a 62% increase. Meanwhile, the Crypto Asset Reporting Framework (CARF) will take effect in 2027, and the first 48 jurisdictions have begun data collection from 2026.
As regulation moved from adversarial to framing, the value of compliance capabilities changed radically. In an environment without regulation, compliance is a cost; in an environment where regulations are clarified, compliance is a barrier. According to data from Binance's 2025 year-end report, the number of institutional users of the platform increased 14% year over year, and institutional transactions increased 13%; according to Binance VIP and Head of Institutional Business Catherine Chen, as of May 2026, more than 15 large financial institutions have connected or are accessing the Binance Crypto-as-a-Service platform; in addition, Binance's institutional-level OTC collateral program allows eligible institutional customers to use Franklin Templeton ( Tokenized money market funds (MMF) issued by platforms such as Franklin Templeton (Franklin Templeton) are used as collateral for OTC (Off-Exchange) transactions.
The prerequisites for this series of institutional business are compliance qualifications.
After the $4.3 billion fine in 2023, it seemed in hindsight that what was bought was a window of time. At a time when most of its competitors are still dealing with regulatory uncertainty, Binance has established a compliance system that can operate in dozens of legislated countries. Early costs are turning into late-stage entry advantages.
Stablecoins: From trading instruments to financial infrastructure
On the Binance platform, a change that has continued to occur over the past six years and has gone through all bull/bear cycles is that the share of stablecoins in users' assets has continued to rise. Of users with at least a $10 combination, 30% allocated more than half of their assets in stablecoins. This ratio was just 4% in 2020. Whether it was a bull run in 2021 or a sharp fall in 2022, this curve didn't change direction. The share of users in emerging markets reached 36%, and developed markets gradually increased from 14% to 19%.
This set of data challenges a long-held assumption that stablecoins are simply a transit point between transactions. If users only hold stablecoins temporarily while trading cryptocurrencies, then the stablecoin allocation ratio should change drastically as the currency price fluctuates. In fact, it didn't. More and more users are treating stablecoins as long-term holdings themselves, similar to a dollar savings account with a yield much higher than a bank deposit.
Currently, Binance holds $53 billion in stablecoin reserves, leading the second place with $42 billion, and its share rose to 57% from 54% in early 2025. There are multiple reasons for this concentration, including deep liquidity attracting traders, Earn products (which distribute a total of $1.2 billion in revenue to stablecoin holders) to retain savings users, and rich trading pairs that reduce the motivation to migrate to other platforms. A single factor cannot be explained; it is the result of multiple product links working together.
After BUSD ceased trading in 2023, Binance abandoned the route of a single proprietary stablecoin and switched to an open multi-stablecoin ecosystem, including FDUSD, Circle's native USDC, and World Liberty Financial's USD1. Of the 6 fastest-growing stablecoins in 2026, 4 are mainly circulating on Binance and BNB Chain. 97% of USYC's supply is on BNB Chain, United Stable (U) is 95% on Binance Ecosystem, and USD1 87% is on Binance and BNB Chain. These stablecoins have chosen the Binance ecosystem as their main location. Liquidity depth and user base are core considerations, and the commercial value of Binance as a distribution channel is attracting new issuers to continue to enter.
From an industry perspective, the scale of stablecoins has far surpassed the needs of crypto transactions themselves. According to statistics from Visa's on-chain analysis team, the monthly adjusted stablecoin trading volume reached 1.79 trillion US dollars in June 2026, totaling about 8.82 trillion US dollars in the first half of the year, an increase of 125% over the previous year. Every weekend, during the 60 hours that traditional financial markets were shut down, stablecoin transfers reached an average of $76 billion, or about $38 billion a day, at the same level as Visa's average daily transaction volume. This shows that stablecoins are embedded in financial workflows that are not bound by traditional market time.
A more cutting-edge signal comes from AI agent payments, which are currently extremely small but worth paying attention to. The median payment amount for AI agents on the x402 protocol is only $0.34, and the number of merchants will quadruple to more than 7,500 in 2026. AI agents can't open bank accounts or complete identity verification, and the permissionless nature of stablecoins makes them a natural option for machine-to-machine micropayments.
RWA is another growth line outside of stablecoins. The total value of on-chain RWA reached about $310-33.5 billion (excluding stablecoins), which nearly tripled in a year. DTCC began testing the production environment for tokenized securities with more than 50 institutions in July. BCG and Standard Chartered expect the RWA market to reach $16 trillion by 2030. Binance accounts for about 60% of CEX RWA trading volume on the exchange side, and BNB Chain is connected to institutional products such as BlackRock BUIDL, Franklin Templeton BENJI, and VanEck VBILL.
The growth of both stablecoins and RWA depends on the carrying capacity of the underlying infrastructure. For Binance, this means that BNB Chain needs to keep up with the pace of business expansion.
Infrastructure Remedial Course and Financial Super Entry
Traditional financial institutions spend more than $20 billion a year on advanced order management systems, and the corresponding investment in the entire crypto industry is only about $185 million. This gap is reflected in various aspects such as risk control systems, clearing efficiency, escrow security, and compliance reporting. As institutional capital enters at an accelerated pace, the maturity of infrastructure will directly determine which platforms can undertake these funds.
BNB Chain is Binance's core investment direction at the infrastructure level. In the first half of 2026, BSC completed a number of performance upgrades, including shortening the block interval from 750 ms to 450 ms, reducing the final memory confirmation time from 1125 ms to 650 ms, and increasing the benchmark throughput from about 2,800 TPS to about 5200 TPS. According to its technical roadmap for the second half of 2026, BNB Chain plans to push the BSC mainnet throughput to double again and develop a next-generation Layer 1 architecture for the next ten years.
In terms of actual usage, BNB Chain processes an average of 10 million stablecoin transactions per day, 15 million monthly active stablecoin addresses, and has processed 5.3 billion stablecoin transactions since 2025, accounting for 24% of the entire network, ranking first. Monthly active addresses increased nearly 30% year over year in 2026.
Additionally, Binance Pay covers 21 million registered merchants, and monthly transaction volume increased 114% year over year, and stablecoins account for 98% of total payments. The median payment amount rose from $10 in 2025 to $18 in 2026. There was little change from $10 to $18, but considering that early stablecoin payments were mostly recharges and small tests, the increase in the amount may mean that more everyday spending and commercial transactions are beginning to be completed through this channel.
In expanding the range of transactions, Binance is testing the viability of crypto tracks to carry traditional financial assets. TradFi-perps started with a base of almost zero in early 2026, and the cumulative trading volume exceeded 1.1 trillion US dollars within five months, accounting for about 11% of the total number of perpetual contracts. Binance accounts for more than $500 billion in trading volume in this category, with a market share of around 47%. This set of data shows that there is a real demand for users to obtain exposure to traditional financial assets through cryptographic tracks, and the scale is considerable.
Currently, Binance has launched zero-commission trading on more than 7,000 US stocks and ETFs, and you can buy fractional shares for as little as $5. On this basis, bStocks, an on-chain tokenized securities product, allows stocks held by users to become verifiable tokenized assets on the chain from equity records in brokerage accounts.
From derivatives to spot tokenization, the distance in between is greater than it seems. Perpetual contracts are essentially price exposure instruments and do not involve real ownership of the underlying asset. Tokenized stocks need to address a series of issues such as securities legal framework, cross-border escrow, investor protection, and tax compliance. These issues mainly focus on the legal and regulatory levels, and the speed of progress depends on the attitude of each jurisdiction.
In less than a month since bStocks went live, the number of tokenized stock assets increased from 5 to 25, and the on-chain listing value was close to $300 million. Interestingly, out of 190,417 bStocks users, a total of 2,806 users participated in cross-market arbitrage. Of these, 206 systematic package users contributed US$198.2 million in quick match transactions, accounting for 96.5% of the relevant trading volume.
Furthermore, the appeal of bStocks is particularly evident during non-trading sessions. During the regular trading period, the share of stock spot trading volume was 52%, and bStocks accounted for 48%; during the non-trading period, bStocks accounted for 58% of stock trading volume, which was higher than 42% of stock spot. At the same time, bStocks is also beginning to extend to the on-chain earnings scenario.
The path of bStocks can be followed, and its significance for Binance goes beyond the level of a single product. When a platform can provide cryptocurrency trading, US stock investment, tokenized asset holding, stablecoin savings, and payment services within the same account, its attributes change from an exchange to a super integrated portal for financial services. The performance upgrade of BNB Chain provides a technical foundation for the settlement of tokenized assets, the stablecoin ecosystem provides currency for pricing and settlement, and the compliance system provides the qualifications to operate in various markets. The combination of the three forms the infrastructure that supports this entrance.
In the traditional financial world, Morgan Stanley launched the first BTC ETF issued by a major US bank in April 2026. The fund holds actual Bitcoin and is the first spot Bitcoin ETF directly issued by a major commercial bank in US history. J.P. Morgan plans to allow institutional clients to use their BTC and ETH holdings as collateral for loans, and the boundaries between traditional finance and crypto finance are becoming increasingly blurred in 2026.
Binance's card slot at this intersection depends on the extent to which it can simultaneously meet the requirements of both parties: providing a sufficiently rich range of traditional assets for crypto users, and sufficient mature infrastructure and compliance guarantees for traditional financial users and institutions.
epilogue
From user growth, compliance layout, stablecoin ecosystem to infrastructure construction, there is a logical chain between investment in the four directions of Binance. The financial needs of emerging markets provide a user base, and the compliance system opens up market access. Stablecoins have become the core use scenario for these users. Infrastructure and bStocks determine how much capital volume and asset class this platform can carry.
Nine years ago, the industry had to solve the problem of how to get people to buy Bitcoin. The 2026 problem has changed, and cryptography is moving from a separate asset class to part of the global financial infrastructure.
There is uncertainty about how long this process will last and what extent it will eventually reach. But at least now, the most meaningful competition in the crypto industry has moved from trading volume rankings to another dimension. Whoever can take the lead in building infrastructure connecting the crypto world with traditional finance can define the next stage of the industry pattern. Binance has given its own answer to this question.
