From Our CEO: Seven Years at The Frontier of Financial Innovation
In less than two days, our team and our global community will celebrate Binance’s seventh anniversary, my first in charge of this incredible organization. By traditional standards, a seven year-old company is a fledgling, often still an aspiring startup; by crypto industry standards, being around for seven years, nearly all of it in a leadership position, means having survived and thrived during several epochs in the development of what is perhaps the fastest-moving sector in history, becoming a seasoned veteran.
As we turn seven, we combine the elements of both: a curious, nimble, growth-oriented mindset of a startup, and the wisdom and tenacity of a battle-tested organization that had withstood multiple crises and learned many important lessons the hard way. With more than 210 million users – and counting – trusting us to support their crypto journeys, this formula appears to be a fitting one to power the global push toward financial freedom and inclusion. Here is where we stand today.
State of the Ecosystem
From our first anniversary to the second, and on to the seventh and all that are yet to come, some fundamental things about Binance don’t change: our focus on users as the sole most important factor driving our decisions; our hardcore work culture and ownership mindset; and our commitment to continuous innovation in the name of tangibly improving people’s lives.
Binance’s past year has been typical in the sense that it saw both tough challenges and exhilarating moments of success. From turning the page on our past issues and the change of leadership to seeing the signs of renewed user confidence in strong inflows and skyrocketing new registrations, we kept strong and never stopped building.
A key achievement this year was breaching the threshold of 200 million global registered users. While some of them are already familiar with digital assets, many are new, trusting Binance to open the doors of the Web3 world for them for the first time, each of them marking a step toward making digital assets mainstream. We warmly welcome these newcomers and pledge to do anything and everything we can to make them comfortable and safe as they explore the future of finance with us.
More users means more funds in Binance’s custody, and earlier this year, the value of our user fund holdings exceeded $100B for the first time. As ever, user funds are SAFU and held transparently at a 1:1 ratio.
Infrastructure for going mainstream
The infrastructure is in place to support experienced and new users’ exploration, along with an extensive range of products and services to meet any of their Web3 and crypto-related needs. Today, Binance supports 541 carefully selected digital assets and 2632 trading pairs. Our systems are robust and prepared to handle massive volumes of user activity. The all-time high Queries Per Second (QPS) across Binance's platform – a metric that captures the number of requests users send to our system and get a response in one second’s time – stands at a whopping 2.58 million. This value shows that Binance is capable of smoothly processing a very significant load when users need it the most.
To facilitate crypto adoption and financial inclusion, we continuously expand the coverage and reach of the products designed to ensure wider access to crypto and provide essential financial services.
Our Simple Earn line of products allow users to grow their crypto holdings in 392 different assets, with more than 8 million users putting their crypto to work via Binance Earn. Another pillar of adoption is payments, and today, more than 24 million people globally use Binance Pay to transfer value safely and efficiently within and across borders.
One of the key drivers of the mainstreaming of digital assets throughout the current market cycle has been increased institutional participation. Attracted by Binance’s unmatched liquidity and market depth, as well as products and solutions tailored to the exacting requirements of professional investors, such organizations flocked into the Binance ecosystem this year: between January and June 2024, we saw more than a 36% increase in institutional registrations.
With respect to another cornerstone of adoption, crypto education, we have reached 43.6 million all-time learners who visited Binance Academy to better understand the world of blockchain and digital assets and interact with it in a more thoughtful and responsible way.
Security and compliance
Throughout our seventh year, our focus on regulatory compliance, already very substantial, became even stronger. Realizing the key role of robust compliance practices in the new phase of the crypto industry’s maturation, we continued attracting top talent, perfecting our systems and technology, and seeking authorizations and registrations in close cooperation with numerous national authorities and regulatory agencies. We now hold licenses and registrations across 18 jurisdictions, more than any other centralized crypto exchange.
Strengthening collaborative security in the digital finance space also remained one of the key areas of Binance’s focus. Our Law Enforcement Training program delivered dozens of on- and offline training sessions, contributing to building the capacity of law enforcement agencies worldwide to combat illicit activity related to or facilitated by digital assets. Between June 2023 and May 2024, Binance teams processed some 62,800 law enforcement requests, bringing the all-time number to 173,800. Each request is instrumental in investigating and prosecuting criminal cases, finding perpetrators, and clawing back victims’ money.
To protect Binance users from potential security breaches and other extreme situations, we maintained the value of our SAFU fund above $1 billion, and will keep doing so in the future. Earlier this year, we transferred all SAFU assets to USDC, a trusted and transparent stablecoin, further improving the fund’s reliability and ensuring it remains stable at $1B.
What The Future Holds
Going into our eighth year of serving crypto users, we are firmly positioned to lead the digital-asset sector into the next stage of its development. Some of the forces that will shape it are already well understood, as respective market and industry trends are in full swing.
Institutionalization of crypto, combined with greater regulatory clarity, will push more large-scale investors and more capital into the space. The retail side of the equation will remain equally important, as the early majority of adopters will continue to expand, drawing in more first-time users from new geographies and demographics. They will require a more intuitive user experience, accessible crypto knowledge and customer support, and constant innovation – all the things that Binance is built to deliver.
With the trust and support of our global community, we are confident that our first seven years of hard work have laid a solid foundation for even greater success on the path of expanding financial freedom and inclusion. We’ve only just begun.