Author: ChandlerZ, Foresight News
Outside the Coca-Cola Arena in Dubai, a sand-colored mosque is surrounded by neon lights, appearing somewhat distorted in the night. Entering the venue, the path to the main hall is lined with dark corridors, with bright yellow light strips embedded in the walls, mimicking Binance's logo; beside it is a huge yellow slide leading to the next level, while spectators line up for the trampoline across the way.
Over the course of two days, this largest indoor venue in the Middle East has been completely transformed into a temporary castle of the crypto world. More than 5,200 attendees, from OGs in hoodies to asset management representatives in suits, were brought together under the same program.
This year's Binance Blockchain Week has been officially defined as "the most ambitious one to date." The event still lasts only two days, but the density of content is far greater than in previous years. The main stage runs almost seamlessly from morning to evening, covering topics from the Bitcoin bull market cycle, stablecoins and the dollar system, to AI integration and innovation, real-world adoption, next-generation infrastructure, institutional growth, and geopolitical risks, with every seat filled.
For those in the crypto asset industry, this is an annual gathering; for the larger financial system, it serves more as a showcase window for a "crypto Nasdaq" that hopes to accommodate the financial behaviors of hundreds of millions.
He Yi Takes Office as Co-CEO
At the Binance Blockchain Week in 2025, co-founder He Yi announced her appointment as Co-CEO, forming a dual CEO management structure with Richard Teng, who took over in 2023.
In a media group interview, He Yi explained that this arrangement is primarily a natural result of division of labor. Richard has years of experience in regulation and traditional finance, making him more familiar with compliance paths across different jurisdictions, and he is seen as a bridge between Binance and regulatory agencies; she herself has come up through early entrepreneurship, standing long at the front lines of product and community, and is closer to real market feedback and user needs.
Over the past year, she has taken over horizontal functions such as human resources, aiming to shift Binance from a company highly reliant on the founder's judgment to an enterprise system that operates based on institutional and organizational capabilities, moving from a focus on individuals to mechanisms.
In her vision, the Co-CEO system is a part of this transformation: one CEO focuses more on regulators and institutions, while the other continues to act as the "Chief Customer Officer," maintaining a user-centered culture and promoting internal organizational restructuring and talent density enhancement, with both sharing the long-term governance responsibilities.
For the outside world, this personnel arrangement has a more intuitive meaning. As Binance scales, it means that a platform's volume in asset custody, matching frequency, and clearing pressure is approaching that of a medium-sized economy's financial infrastructure; at such a scale, single "strongman" management is difficult to sustain, and compliance and user voice cannot easily be held by the same person.
The dual structure is seen as a compromise between "user priority" and "compliance priority," and it signals Binance's attempt to transition from a rapidly expanding crypto company to an infrastructure-type institution seeking survival within regulatory oversight.
He Yi attributes her reason for staying at Binance to a sense of responsibility. A large number of users choose to entrust their assets to the platform, which means Binance is not only managing a vast amount of funds but also participating in shaping a new phase of the global financial system.
This sense of responsibility soon had a concrete number as a footnote:
On December 8, Binance founder Zhao Changpeng announced, "The number of registered users on Binance has exceeded 300 million."
"Compliance and Security" First
Looking back at Binance's own data, by the end of 2024, the exchange disclosed that its registered users had surpassed 250 million, a year-on-year increase of 47%; the scale of user assets under custody was approximately $160 billion, and the cumulative historical trading volume of all products reached the level of $100 trillion.
In July, while celebrating its eighth anniversary, Binance disclosed the latest figures of 280 million users and a cumulative trading volume of $125 trillion.
By the end of 2025, this figure had officially surpassed 300 million.
This scale is more intuitively measured against the traditional financial system. Over 250 million registered users roughly equate to the total number of securities accounts in several medium-sized economies, and it is close to the size of a large retail banking group's global personal customer base.
For any set of technology and operational systems, this means that order matching, risk control engines, clearing, and custody systems must operate under "national-level" loads for the long term.
However, what truly determines whether Binance can bear this volume is not the growth itself, but its dealings with regulatory and compliance systems over the past two years.
In 2023, Binance reached a settlement agreement totaling approximately $4.3 billion with the U.S. Department of Justice and the Treasury Department's agencies. By October 23, 2025, the White House announced that Trump had pardoned Zhao Changpeng.
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt stated at a press conference that Zhao Changpeng's pardon reached Trump's desk for final approval after undergoing standard review procedures. Leavitt emphasized that the pardon process was handled with "extreme seriousness," stating, "We have a very thorough review process, working with the Department of Justice and the White House Counsel's Office, with a whole qualified team of lawyers reviewing every final pardon request submitted to the President of the United States."
Binance's global operational path is also changing. On one hand, Binance is concentrating on applying for and updating licenses in multiple jurisdictions across Europe, the Middle East, and Asia, recently obtaining a "global license" under the Abu Dhabi Global Market (ADGM) framework, becoming the first crypto trading platform approved under this framework. Starting January 5, 2026, Binance services will be provided through three entities licensed by ADGM, each playing a specific role based on its regulatory permissions: Nest Exchange Services Limited: as an "approved investment trading platform (authorized to operate a multilateral trading facility)" responsible for all trading platform-related activities, including spot and derivatives trading; Nest Clearing and Custody Limited: as an "approved clearing house (authorized to provide custody services)," responsible for clearing and settlement, serving as the central counterparty for derivatives trading on the trading platform, and ensuring the security of users' digital assets; Nest Trading Limited: as a "broker-dealer" responsible for over-the-counter trading activities and proprietary services (e.g., OTC trading, flash exchanges, wealth management).
On the other hand, Binance regularly publishes compliance and security reports and makes updates on user asset proof (PoR) and reserve transparency more frequently than the industry average.
Behind the number of 300 million users is a system that must maintain continuous operation under extreme market conditions and regulatory pressure.
When Bitcoin futures open interest hits a new high, ETF net subscriptions exceed $1 billion in a single day, and stablecoin cross-border settlement flows surge, the matching engine, clearing links, and risk control limits must all withstand the test simultaneously.
Bringing the IPO Pipeline into the Crypto World
If user scale and compliance structure determine whether the platform can survive in the "superstructure," then the new listing mechanism directly affects its pricing power on the asset side.
By the end of 2024, Binance Wallet launched Binance Alpha, officially defined as a selection pool for observing tokens before listing. The platform team selects a batch of emerging tokens based on community interest, industry trends, and project quality, displaying them to users on the wallet and providing a one-click purchase entry.
Unlike traditional Launchpads or IDOs, Alpha is closer to a pre-listing channel: users can participate in early projects selected by the platform without needing to open an additional on-chain wallet or excessively engage with complex contracts, through centralized accounts; these projects then have the opportunity to "graduate" at some point and be considered for listing on Binance's main board.
In more familiar capital market language, this mechanism has a clear IPO pipeline flavor. Projects accumulate interest and liquidity within a relatively closed candidate pool, with the platform taking on part of the functions of information filtering, due diligence, and risk warning, ultimately allowing the main board market to complete broader price discovery.
According to data provided by Binance on Alpha tokens, as of August, out of 152 Alpha tokens (including TGE, airdrops, and Boosters), 23 successfully launched on Binance's spot market, and 72 launched on Binance contracts.
Since the official does not guarantee that all Alpha projects will be listed on the main board, this mechanism lowers the participation threshold for users while also layering market expectations on the platform's filtering capabilities.
This expectation brings both opportunities and pressures. It positions Binance more proactively in terms of "new project supply." Currently, project parties find it increasingly difficult to complete cold starts relying solely on fully decentralized issuance paths, and the new listing windows of leading exchanges have once again become the most important liquidity entry; however, the high-frequency operation of the candidate pool also raises the thresholds for project filtering and information disclosure, and once concentrated failures or significant information asymmetries occur, doubts will return to the platform at a faster pace.
Stablecoins and 20 Million Merchants: When Crypto Becomes a Production Tool
If Alpha represents innovation in financing and pricing, then stablecoins and payments point to more fundamental "production tools."
Since its launch in 2021, the growth of Binance Pay can be described as "explosive." In 2024, the total transaction volume processed by this service was approximately $72.4 billion, with the number of users reaching 41.7 million.
Entering 2025, this growth extended from the user side to the merchant side. According to Binance's official statistics, at the beginning of the year, there were only about 12,000 merchants supporting Binance Pay, but by November, this number had exceeded 20 million, growing more than 1,700 times in ten months; cumulatively, the total transaction volume of Binance Pay since its launch has exceeded $250 billion, covering over 45 million users, with stablecoin settlements accounting for over 98% of B2C payments since 2025.
More importantly, these transactions are not merely symbolic support for crypto payments. Through integration with local payment networks and scenarios in various countries, the use of Binance Pay is gradually embedded in real-life and business contexts.
The latest collaboration is the integration of Binance Pay with Brazil's central bank-led instant payment network, Pix. Whether local users in Brazil or Argentine residents holding Binance accounts, they can directly use crypto assets to pay bills and expenses with Pix QR codes. Similar integrations have also appeared in scenarios such as the Bhutan Tourism Bureau, which has integrated Binance Pay to support tourists in paying for flights, visas, and local service fees with digital assets.
For many small and medium-sized cross-border sellers, freelancers, and travel service providers, "receiving stablecoins first, then choosing the right time to exchange for local fiat" is becoming the actual operational process.
This has quietly elevated the status of Binance Pay within the overall Binance ecosystem from a value-added service to a true financial infrastructure. One end connects the exchange's account system and liquidity pool, while the other connects payment scenarios and local currencies across multiple continents. For those who do not see themselves as "crypto investors," the entry point to Binance may not be a spot trading pair, but rather a payment QR code that pops up during travel or online shopping.
After 300 Million Users, the Real Test Begins
If we extend the timeline to the entire year, 2025 can almost be seen as a year of global liquidity repricing. Major central banks have repeatedly tested the waters between high interest rates and falling inflation, U.S. stocks have experienced multiple sharp fluctuations, and technology and AI sectors have oscillated between optimism and bubble controversies, with the ups and downs of risk assets showing stronger synchronization. Crypto assets have been incorporated into the formal allocation frameworks of more asset managers.
In mid-July, the total market capitalization of cryptocurrencies globally first surpassed $4 trillion, reaching approximately $4.35 trillion in October. This upward trend was not solely driven by narrative. The U.S. introduced a package of crypto legislation, and several major economies established regulatory frameworks around stablecoins and tokenized assets, providing compliant entry points for mainstream capital; CME's crypto futures and options saw a total trading volume exceeding $900 billion in the third quarter, with Bitcoin futures open interest reaching $72 billion at one point, indicating that hedge funds, macro funds, and asset management institutions have begun to view Bitcoin and others as standardized assets that can be managed through futures, options, and ETFs. Spot ETFs further reshaped market structure: BlackRock's IBIT surpassed $70 billion in scale in less than a year, and the total assets of Bitcoin spot ETFs once exceeded $140 billion, systematically establishing a funding pipeline between crypto assets and traditional capital markets for the first time.
In this process, Binance occupies a delicate position. Due to the constraints of the U.S. regulatory framework, the custody and primary trading of ETF products mostly occur within compliant custodial institutions and traditional brokerage systems; on the other hand, these products still rely on over-the-counter market making and the depth and quotes of major global spot and contract trading venues for hedging, rebalancing, and liquidity management, with Binance remaining one of the highest-weighted players among them.
In other words, the mainstream institutional path to ETF allocation for Bitcoin and Ethereum, along with the liquidity supply capabilities of leading crypto platforms like Binance, form a mutually binding relationship.
At the same time, another traditional giant, Franklin Templeton, is also accelerating its digital asset layout. In addition to launching Bitcoin and Ethereum spot ETFs and releasing an annual outlook for crypto and tokenized assets, the company announced in 2025 partnerships with multiple platforms to promote tokenized money market funds and plans to reach a broader base of end investors through digital wallets, including exploring digital asset products with platforms like Binance.
Returning to the initial question. When Binance claims to have surpassed 300 million users, and the market describes it as the "crypto Nasdaq," what is the true premise for this metaphor to hold?
In traditional capital markets, the significance of Nasdaq lies not only in its market capitalization and the number of listed companies but also in its ability to rarely become a source of risk due to its own technological or governance failures amid multiple rounds of tech bubbles, liquidity tightening, and systemic panic.
At the most pressured moments, matching and clearing still operate, and no matter how volatile the prices, the market itself remains orderly.
Binance now stands at a similar starting point, with 300 million users making it an unavoidable key node for industry sentiment and liquidity; the rectification following the U.S. compliance settlement, the licensing progress achieved in Europe and the Middle East, and the collaboration with institutions like BlackRock and Franklin in terms of products and infrastructure have firmly embedded it within the existing financial system.
At this point in 2025, whether it is institutional funds, stablecoin flows, or ordinary users, they are entering this market in a more institutionalized manner, and infrastructure platforms like Binance have become an indispensable part of this pathway.
In this sense, the "crypto Nasdaq of 300 million people" resembles an exam paper handed to the market in advance. Given its current scale, compliance restructuring, and infrastructure investment, Binance has already written down a significant portion of the answers.
What remains for it is time and cycles.
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