The Future of Finance in Your Wallet: A Huge Year for Binance Pay!
Main Takeaways
Despite a challenging backdrop to 2023, Binance Pay witnessed remarkable growth last year, and bolstered its position as a leading platform for crypto payments.
Over the last 12 months, Binance Pay has focused on user-friendly innovation, seamlessly integrating crypto payments into daily transactions through initiatives such as DeFi wallet integrations and diverse industry partnerships.
Reinforcing Binance’s vision of promoting the freedom of money through crypto, Binance Pay acts as a crucial bridge, unlocking crypto payments as a key stepping stone towards wider crypto adoption.
Reflecting on the whirlwind year that was 2023, the resilience of the crypto community shone through a backdrop of market uncertainty. Together, we continued to explore innovative ways to integrate crypto into everyday life, including in the realm of payments, which have enormous potential for driving mass adoption. All of which makes it exceedingly heartening to announce the remarkable growth Binance Pay experienced in 2023, despite the challenging landscape.
Back in February 2021, we pioneered Binance Pay as a novel approach for users to pay seamlessly with cryptocurrency — from travel and hotel bookings to fashion purchases and beyond. Originally launched as a simple online pay button, Binance Pay has since evolved to encompass a multitude of crypto payment methods.
Over the past three years, the platform has seen and celebrated steady adoption, with total transactions exceeding a staggering $120B. Paying with crypto has never been easier or more prevalent! Read on as we delve into Binance Pay’s defining moments of 2023, explore how our user-first approach has been central to growth, and discuss the way forward for facilitating the continued role of crypto payments in driving global crypto adoption.
Accelerating Growth Through User-Centric Commitment
As with everything we do at Binance, building trust and putting our users first has always been a central mission of Binance Pay. And so 2023 was a year of consistent product enhancement, where we onboarded a range of new merchants and partners across different industries — all with the goal of providing even more value to you, our global users and community.
Let’s look at some of the highlights from 2023.
Embracing Crypto using Binance Pay
Transaction volumes for Binance Pay soared by over 71% year-on-year, and exceeded $77B in 2023. But that’s not all, our user base grew significantly too. By the end of 2023, the number of active Binance Pay users shot up by nearly 70%, to over 12M. An increasing number of Binance users are now leveraging Binance Pay to gift, send, and receive crypto transactions. This growth signals the deeper blending of crypto into everyday transactions — a trend which we believe will persist as more people and businesses tap into crypto’s enormous potential.
Over the past year alone, thousands of new merchants have been added to Binance Pay. Together, these merchants create a broad shopping experience, helping to integrate paying for what you want with crypto into everyday life. 2023 also saw Binance Pay launch partnerships with key players in a range of new industries — both within and beyond the crypto ecosystem — to make crypto transactions more accessible and seamless for all.
A notable example would be Binance Pay’s integrations with DeFi wallets, such as Trust Wallet, to simplify and bridge billions of dollars in asset transfers. We also partnered and worked closely with various organizations to facilitate crypto payouts to consumers in a wide range of areas, including salary disbursement and loyalty rewards disbursements.
Building and Evolving Crypto Payments
In our quest to keep pace with our users’ evolving needs, we have developed and weaved a series of new features into Binance Pay. From being able to send crypto easily via the ‘Send Cash’ function to conveniently paying your part of the bill in crypto with ‘Split Bills’, each feature on Binance Pay is meticulously thought through and designed to help make paying in crypto as simple and useful as possible.
To help people get to grips with these features, Binance also launched a series of comprehensive campaigns for users throughout the year. These initiatives aimed to smoothly introduce both new and existing users to crypto payments, simplifying their first use and clarifying complexities.
The Future of Crypto Payments
At Binance we believe that crypto payments have the potential to play an instrumental role in facilitating widespread crypto adoption. This aligns with our broader vision to promote the freedom of money to the global community.
Our CEO Richard Teng, in a September 2023 interview with CoinBureau, shared how the liberating capability of crypto is already being observed in many developing countries:
“Today, they are able to use crypto to make payments, transfers and remittances at a fraction of the cost of what traditional finance offers. They are able to get exposure to financial assets at the fraction of the cost, on a 24/7 basis. That’s the beauty of it.”
However, the potential and power of crypto to provide individuals with financial empowerment applies to all, including those in developed countries as well. Crypto encompasses more than just a means for payments and transfers; there is a vast, complex ecosystem, which also includes DeFi, SocialFi, NFTs, and more.
We see crypto payment as being the bridge into the expansive, complex world of Web3. People across the world are already accustomed to cashless payments, and so transitioning to crypto through payments is familiar and less intimidating. Crypto payments become a key stepping stone for their journey into the crypto ecosystem.
Making Binance Pay the Payments Highway
After a huge year of payments in 2023, this year Binance Pay is planning to go even further. Our goal is to make paying with crypto as easy as ‘see, click, buy’ — and to pave the way for the industry in crypto payment technology.
Whether that’s looking to add even more innovative ways for people to pay, building new features that incorporate the latest payment trends into crypto, or onboarding exciting new partners who want to bring crypto payments into their world, we’re excited to build for the future and to see what this year brings.
Jonathan Lim, Global Head of Binance Pay, shared:
“Our team is incredibly heartened by the milestones we achieved in 2023. There’s increasing recognition amongst users and businesses of the real-world use cases that crypto offers, and we are happy to be able to provide the infrastructure to facilitate this process. At Binance Pay, we’re not just building a product; we’re cultivating a shift in financial paradigms across the globe. Our users’ trust and adoption of Binance Pay reflect their belief in this seismic shift.
“As we forge ahead in 2024, our commitment remains intact: to offer a secure, convenient, and expansive crypto payments ecosystem that users value. This is just the beginning of an exciting journey towards global financial inclusion and democratization.”
The future of crypto payments is brighter than ever, and it’s only going to get better!