The crypto market is struggling, competitors are either passing through hard times or pivoting to other areas, while Binance is building with eyes on increasing its active user base ten-fold to 3 billion by 2030, Catherine Chen, the head of VIP and Institutional told CoinDesk in an interview.

“It is true, the market is going through a hard time,” Chen said. “There is still some regulatory development, we are seeing some of our competitors either struggling or perhaps shifting their focus.”

Coinbase, for example, recently reduced its workforce by 14% or nearly 700 staffers, citing negative market conditions as well as AI challenges, part of a wave of crypto employee layoffs this year.

As BTC faces resistance to reclaim the psychological six-figure mark over $100,000, a level it has not seen since mid-November, the broader market seeks sustainable growth drivers beyond retail speculation. The total crypto market capitalization was hovering around the $2.7 trillion mark, down by nearly 40% from its all-time-high of $4.38 trillion before the October Flash Crash, from which bitcoin has not recovered.

Chen said Binance’s position remains robust despite the market downturn, noting the exchange currently serves more than 310 million active users. She emphasized these are “actual active individual users,” verified through stringent KYC and corporate KYB protocols, not just “registered” accounts, she clarified. Binance is considered the largest crypto exchange in the world, dominating in the market in trading volume and registered users. Coingecko ranks Binance second with daily trading volume averaging roughly $7 billion.

Bridging the $2 billion institution spending gap

Chen speaks of a digital asset market that is growing so significantly and with such enormous potential, that only collaboration between traditional finance (TradFi) and native cryptocurrency will see both sides emerge winners in the future.

Binance is going after the massive spending disparity between traditional and digital asset desks, Chen said. She noted that 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 newOMS tool kit is designed to bridge this exact gap, partnering with industry mainstays like Coin Metrics, Talos and 3Commas to provide institutional-grade flow analytics, Chen said.

“Financial institutions are increasingly merging with crypto exchanges and blockchain infrastructure providers,” said Chen. “They don't want to be building all that infrastructure themselves.”

Pledging Wall Street assets on crypto rails

This convergence has moved past theoretical trading and into the core plumbing of institutional custody. So, while the market watches retail trends, Chen noted, Binance has rolled out an institutional “triparty” banking framework designed to alleviate the ultimate TradFi pain point that is counterparty risk.

Institutional clients do not want to custody crypto directly nor do they want to leave their capital on an exchange, Chen added. Instead, they want to custody fiat or fiat-equivalents with their existing banking partners.

To solve this problem, Binance has silently integrated with sovereign-grade asset management, Chen stated, adding that the crypto exchange now accepts tokenized money market funds from institutional giants BlackRock and Franklin Templeton as eligible triparty ecosystems.

Instead of manually rolling Treasury futures and incurring heavy administrative fees, institutional traders can now pledge real-time, yield-bearing tokenized shares to back their trading operations.

“Whether it is equities, treasury, or debt, this is the way forward,” Chen notes, pointing to a 12-to-18-month horizon where real-world asset (RWA) tokenization matures rapidly. "People have finally figured out that you don't magically change the fundamental characteristics or price of an asset by tokenizing it. It is fundamentally an improved form to ensure better accessibility."

Binance also recently rolled out its Crypto-as-a-Service (CaaS) platform designed exclusively for financial institutions seeking to get involved in the digital asset sector in September of last year, Chen recalled. Since then, she added, over 15 major financial institutions have sought their services.

“Whenever the market is bad, it is always the best time for us to build,” Chen says. “We are building and positioning ourselves to 10x our user base when people aren't noticing—and then, hopefully, we are already there.”