Binance targets 3 billion users by 2030 as crypto and traditional finance converge
In brief
- Binance plans tenfold growth from 310 million to 3 billion active users by 2030.
- Crypto infrastructure spending ($185M annually) lags traditional finance OMS spending ($2B+) significantly.
- Binance integrated sovereign-grade asset management, now accepting tokenized funds from BlackRock and Franklin Templeton.
- Financial institutions merge with crypto exchanges rather than building proprietary infrastructure, Chen said.
- Real-world asset tokenization expected to mature within 12 to 18 months, accelerating institutional adoption.
Building through market downturns
The timing of Binance's expansion strategy stands in sharp relief to industry headwinds. Bitcoin has not recovered to the psychological six-figure mark over $100,000 since mid-November, and the total crypto market capitalization was hovering around $2.7 trillion, down nearly 40% from its all-time high of $4.38 trillion. Competitors have retreated. Coinbase reduced its workforce by 14% or nearly 700 staffers, citing negative market conditions and AI challenges.
Chen framed the downturn as opportunity. "It is true, the market is going through a hard time," she said, adding that Binance is instead investing in infrastructure and institutional onboarding. The exchange currently serves more than 310 million active users verified through KYC and KYB protocols — a foundation for the proposed tenfold growth.
Bridging the infrastructure gap
A major bottleneck stands between crypto and traditional finance: spending. TradFi spends north of $2 billion annually on advanced Order Management Systems (OMS). In crypto, infrastructure spend is less than a tenth of that, sitting at around $185 million.
Binance's response: close the gap. Binance's new OMS toolkit partners with Coin Metrics, Talos, and 3Commas to provide institutional-grade flow analytics. The tool is designed to let institutional traders run crypto operations at parity with equity and fixed-income desks.
The exchange has also moved upstream. Binance has silently integrated with sovereign-grade asset management, accepting tokenized money market funds from BlackRock and Franklin Templeton as eligible triparty ecosystems.
The merger thesis
Chen's core argument hinges on institutional preference. Rather than build blockchain infrastructure in-house, she said, traditional finance firms are choosing to partner with or integrate into existing crypto platforms. "Financial institutions are increasingly merging with crypto exchanges and blockchain infrastructure providers. They don't want to be building all that infrastructure themselves," she said.
This isn't a Wall Street takeover of crypto, nor a crypto takeover of Wall Street. It's convergence. Chen pointed to a 12-to-18-month horizon where real-world asset tokenization matures rapidly, unlocking new institutional use cases across equities, treasuries, and debt markets.
Neither sector will dominate the other. Instead, the two will operate as a single ecosystem, with crypto providing the rails and traditional finance providing the capital and regulatory credibility.
