On July 14, Bitcoin, the ‘golden signboard’ of Web3, broke through the $120,000 mark, and Binance, which contributed the largest trading volume, crossed a new milestone on its eighth anniversary: over 280 million registered users, accounting for 50% of global cryptocurrency users.
The number 280 million is almost on par with Netflix, one of the world's most well-known streaming platforms. The long-established internet giant Amazon only surpassed 300 million Prime members this year, 20 years after it was born to ‘save users shipping costs’.
As early as last September, external estimates valued Binance at $62 billion, far exceeding that of its then-listed peer Coinbase (valued at $47.5 billion).
$60 billion valuation took the original internet giant Microsoft 21 years; the ‘post-90s’ e-commerce king Amazon took 16 years, JD.com took 20 years, and Google, benefiting from its advertising business, took 9 years; even Baidu, born in the millennium, took 10 years. Now, they are all collectively referred to as internet giants.
Beginning in 2017, the year the new internet unicorns emerged, Binance stepped into another river; it did not employ the strategies of major companies such as ‘cross-industry competition and mergers for completeness,’ but rather quietly achieved some of what internet companies take 10 or even 20 years to accomplish in just eight years.
Compared to Web2.0 large groups that span multiple businesses such as social, search, gaming, e-commerce, video, and finance, how exactly has a company that solely focuses on cryptocurrency services grown from a market of less than $100 billion with an unclear future into today’s crypto unicorn?
The exploration of entrepreneurial myths is always a matter of hindsight, yet summarizing it is always necessary. For Binance, ‘users, focus, and foresight’ are unavoidable keywords when describing it in the industry.
Eight years, from 0 to 280 million users.
281,876,467. The number of registered users on Binance's official website is still increasing, approaching 300 million. At the beginning of this January, this number was 250 million, meaning that in just half a year, Binance added over 30 million users, nearly the population size of two Tokyos or four Hong Kongs.
This is the achievement accumulated by Binance over eight years.
In these eight years, its user trading volume has exceeded $125 trillion, which is 13% higher than the total global GDP in 2024 (approximately $110.5 trillion). With a trading execution rate of 2,511 transactions per second, Binance's daily trading volume reaches 217 million transactions, and during peak trading times, the number of requests processed per second (RPS) can reach 4.475 million, with an average daily trading volume exceeding $70 billion, peaking over $100 billion.
Today’s Binance is no longer just a ‘cryptocurrency trading platform’; trading was merely its initial scenario, as it now encompasses various aspects related to cryptocurrency, such as payments, lending, investment, social interaction, learning, and charity, categorized into over 30 different functions, with more than 5,000 employees from around the world providing services in over 40 languages.
The number of Binance users has exceeded 280 million.
From various data dimensions, Binance has already become a super unicorn in the cryptocurrency asset industry, with ‘first’ and ‘largest’ being fixed labels when the outside world refers to it.
If we go back to July 14, 2017, the day Binance launched its website, it was quite rudimentary—only 5 tokens were listed, with two service languages offered, and ‘even the customer service team was borrowed from elsewhere; there was simply no marketing team.’ Binance founder Zhao Changpeng (also known as CZ) recalled the scene when he was starting Binance.
That year was when the internet industry saw a surge in unicorns. In 2013, venture capitalist Aileen Lee coined the term ‘unicorn’ to describe startups valued at $1 billion or more, and it has been used throughout the internet entrepreneurial wave ever since. By the time Binance was founded in 2017, there were already 193 ‘unicorn’ companies emerging globally, with China accounting for 108 of them (according to data from the China Investment Network); now well-known companies like Ant Financial, Xiaomi, Didi Chuxing, Meituan-Dianping, DJI, and Tencent Music are all on the list.
Binance is also keeping pace with the golden era of internet entrepreneurship, but it chose not to follow; instead, it embarked on another obscure path—blockchain. In 2017, this concept was imbued with high hopes by industry participants under the notion of ‘value internet’ and distinguished itself from the ‘information internet’ with the label ‘Web3.0’. Believers see this as a new form of the next generation of the internet, a trend, a future. But for many ordinary people, let alone back then, even today, cryptocurrencies and Bitcoin still feel like foreign products.
Zhao Changpeng is also one of the believers. The difference is that Binance is not one of those blockchain token projects that erupted in 2017 with only slogans and white papers; like an online marketplace providing goods, Binance set off amid the emergence of various crypto assets on the blockchain.
On December 18, 2017, just five months after Binance went live, Zhao Changpeng's phone buzzed with congratulatory messages from others; ‘It took me a few minutes to realize: on that day, Binance became the largest cryptocurrency trading platform by trading volume in the world.’
In just 5 months, Binance topped the leaderboard in the cryptocurrency exchange industry, maintaining a leading or even absolute leading market position for the following 7 years.
Even after experiencing the ‘thousand schools of thought’ battle in 2018 and the deep bear market following the collapse of the cryptocurrency bubble in 2019, Binance has always held onto its ‘golden signboard’, occupying 53.7% of the market share with the highest trading volume in cryptocurrency spot and derivatives by the end of 2023, and attracting 50% of the global cryptocurrency user population when Bitcoin reaches new highs in 2025.
If compared to internet financial service companies, Ant Financial's flagship product Alipay surpassed PayPal to become the world's largest third-party payment platform with 200 million users in 2009, six years after it was launched in 2003 as a payment tool for Taobao transactions. In contrast, PayPal took 20 years to finally break through 277 million users in 2019.
Of course, as of now, the cryptocurrency market, with a valuation of only $3 trillion, is far from the scale that the internet financial market can support, and it is not as mature in terms of services as the latter. For example, in terms of mobile payment, China boasts the highest penetration rate globally at 86%, while the U.S. and Germany account for 48%.
It is precisely because it grew in an era of mature internet infrastructure, exploded during the proliferation of mobile phones, an influx of online merchants, and a surge in demand for mobile payments, that digital mobile payment applications like Alipay and PayPal have taken root in various fiat currencies such as the dollar, euro, and renminbi, which people are already familiar, trust, and depend on, becoming indispensable tools in their lives.
In contrast, in the cryptocurrency market driven and secured not by national credit, which requires curious individuals to continuously learn and understand, Binance stands out as particularly difficult; achieving a 50% market share and 50% user market share in eight years is indeed a remarkable breakthrough.
From 1 to 30+ functions, striving for cryptocurrency services.
In June of this year, the world's largest stablecoin issuer Circle held its first IPO, with a total market value of $6.8 billion; last September, media outlets estimated that Binance's valuation had already exceeded $62 billion, surpassing the then publicly listed Coinbase (valued at $47.5 billion).
Currently, Coinbase's market value is $103 billion. If calculated based on the year-on-year growth rate, Binance's valuation exceeds $130 billion, which is close to the market value of the BNB token supported by Binance (valued at $110 billion). If using $60 billion as a standard, the famous BAT in China (Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent) took 10 years, 14 years, and 13 years, respectively.
Starting from search engines, Baidu (market value $31.7 billion) now regards AI as a key technology, upgrading its search, cloud services, and other old businesses; Alibaba Group (market value $287.9 billion), which started in e-commerce, has business lines that now span payments, travel, film and television, cloud services, office solutions, health, and more; Tencent (market value $4.9 trillion) integrates various scenarios such as gaming, music, social, and payments.
Not to mention earlier tech companies like Microsoft (market value $3.76 trillion) and Alphabet ($2.33 trillion), even the ‘post-00s’ and ‘post-10s’ of internet startups are trying to encompass every aspect of human life. Meta (market value $1.77 trillion) has ventured from social media into the XR hardware field; ByteDance is no longer satisfied with Douyin/Tiktok and has extended its reach into AI and e-commerce; and JD.com (market value $53.7 billion), which started in 3C e-commerce, is now competing in the food delivery market.
Giants seem to have entered a vicious circle where they can only break through development bottlenecks by expanding business sectors and competing for existing markets. Compared to internet companies, Binance stubbornly resembles Sisyphus, without much distraction, solely focused on promoting the ‘boulder’ of cryptocurrency services. Internet technology and AI capabilities are its tools for expanding blockchain infrastructure and cryptocurrency application scenarios; even in expansion, it only revolves around the needs and experiences of cryptocurrency users.
Binance has now grown into a blockchain ecosystem.
In the year of its establishment in 2017, as it became increasingly inconvenient for market users to purchase cryptocurrency assets with fiat currency, Binance quickly launched cryptocurrency trading, allowing one cryptocurrency to be exchanged for another, such as BTC/ETH. With more and more trading pairs, a large influx of users flocked to Binance, sparking its first user explosion, forcing even earlier trading platforms to follow suit to maintain market share.
In 2019, when user demand for low-cost access to early project tokens surged, Launchpad was born—a platform for exchanging BNB or other cryptocurrencies for emerging tokens. Binance Launchpad even led a wave from 2019 to 2020, which is the foundation for what we now know as Binance Launchpool and HODLer Airdrop.
Since the start of trading, Binance's services related to cryptocurrency have become increasingly diversified. By 2024, Binance's commitment to financial inclusivity in crypto will translate into breakthrough growth for Binance Pay (payments), fiat channels, and Binance Earn (wealth management), providing users with seamless access to payment, cross-border transactions, and crypto-based savings.
As of now, Binance Pay has processed 300 million transactions, amounting to $230 billion. From 2022 to 2024, it has already helped users save $1.75 billion in remittance fees, providing a cost-effective alternative for cross-border payments, freelancers, merchants, and families. Binance's initial vision—making cryptocurrency assets not just a holding entity but a tool for daily use—is being realized.
In addition to its relentless focus on product experience, Binance is also a company that consistently brings industry innovations to user adoption, enabling sustainable development of emerging models, even if it is not the original creator.
These products include MegaDrop, which emerged from the popular on-chain task-based token generation (TGE) model, HODLer Airdrops (holding token airdrops) derived from the interest-bearing features available on various trading platforms, and Pre-Market Trading, learned from traditional financial market operations. These products, supported by underlying technology, provide millions of users on Binance with opportunities to access early selected Web3 projects.
If you have recently used Binance's new asset airdrop platform, Alpha, some veteran cryptocurrency enthusiasts might tell you an old term ‘transaction mining’. That was a gameplay ignited by a dazzling exchange star in 2018—earning the exchange's platform tokens by trading cryptocurrencies and getting 100% of transaction fees refunded. This gameplay allowed the platform to rise quickly but ultimately collapsed due to lack of transparency and unsustainability, leading to a break in the funding chain and the founder running away. The star quickly fell.
Today, as on-chain transaction costs decrease and the transparency of information such as issuance volumes becomes increasingly accessible, Alpha, integrated from the Binance wallet into the main Binance site, has become an observer for new assets listed on Binance. By establishing point systems and testing user interest and loyalty towards various new projects through airdrops of multiple new tokens, the cost of listing new projects on Binance is directly allocated to users who contribute to trading, creating a cycle of project exposure—platform verification—user earning early profits.
‘Rewards earned through contribution transactions.’ Following the same model, it destroyed the company that initiated it seven years ago, and today it has become a popular product on Binance. According to statistics, eligible users on the Alpha platform are expected to receive an average of $2,569 in airdrop rewards and $1,651 in TGE allocations between mid-February and the end of May 2025.
Some demands may be constrained by technological bottlenecks both on-chain and off-chain, but Binance has not forgotten.
In 2019, a user named @LukasBydzovsky asked CZ, ‘How about logging into binance.com using Wallet Connect?’ At that time, Zhao Changpeng confidently said it was a good idea, but because ‘Binance is a high-frequency trading platform, this demand requires centralized trading platforms to handle a large amount of clearing, and we need to custody/clear funds before trading, so it’s still difficult to achieve now.’
Today, innovative technologies such as Binance Connect (wallet connection) and Login with Binance (log in with Binance) have achieved interoperability between Binance and various on-chain digital asset ecosystems through the expansion of third-party integrations. As of now, Binance Wallet has over 20 million users globally, becoming the cornerstone of Binance's decentralized products.
The user’s ‘fantasy’ from six years ago has now become reality with Binance, recorded in a Q&A on the Binance Blog, seemingly a shining signpost for understanding Binance's journey.
Foreseeing compliance ‘tailwinds’ amid resistance.
Whether in the Web2.0 realm or the Web3.0 world, for startups, it is not easy to grow stronger by following trends, and maintaining stability is even more challenging. Even giants like Google and Apple have faced regulations and constraints, and the blockchain and cryptocurrency industry, which has only emerged in less than 20 years, is even more so.
Binance has also experienced more than one dark moment due to regulatory constraints, including exiting the Chinese market in September 2017, repeatedly suspending services for Japanese users from 2018 to 2021, and pleading guilty to violations against the U.S. Department of Justice in 2023.
After several ups and downs, Binance transitioned from the forced overseas expansion, migration, and decentralized global development in its initial 3-4 years to a proactive stance on security and compliance.
In recent years, Binance has frequently engaged and communicated with regulators, proactively educating decision-makers in various countries about the benefits and drawbacks of cryptocurrency assets and related technologies, inviting experienced former members of regulatory agencies to hold key positions in Binance, expanding its security team, and cooperating with law enforcement agencies to combat risks that hinder industry development and endanger investor safety.
From a temporal perspective, Binance has been maintaining user asset security and privacy protection even before actively pursuing compliance.
In July 2018, just a year after Binance was founded, this trading platform launched the ‘Secure Asset Fund for Users (SAFU)’ and publicly disclosed the address, deciding to allocate 10% of its earned trading fees to this fund regularly, maintaining a total fund balance of $1 billion to proactively set aside funds for unpredictable risks, prioritizing the safety of users' assets.
In 2022, Binance publicly released proof of reserves (PoR), allowing users to verify at any time whether their assets held in custody are sufficiently backed at least on a 1:1 ratio, ensuring that the debt in Binance's capital structure is zero. As of July 1 this year, Binance's PoR shows that asset reserve ratios are all above 100%, with BNB's reserve at 111% and USDC's reserve reaching as high as 152%. In addition to the excess reserves protecting user assets, Binance is also strengthening technical safeguards, with its risk and security team continuously optimizing detection systems to monitor malicious activities earlier and respond faster, while regularly releasing security guidelines to help users identify risks and even prevent losses. From December 2022 to May 2025, Binance avoided nearly $10 billion in potential fraud losses and directly helped 7.5 million users through freezing and recovery operations and real-time threat detection.
When Binance built its firewall, the regulatory and law enforcement environment for cryptocurrency assets also changed in recent years.
In 2019, Zhao Changpeng revealed that regulators and officials from multiple countries he had contacted clearly stated that cryptocurrency assets were not within their jurisdiction. However, after 2020, the situation changed, as countries and regions, including the U.S., Japan, and various European countries, began paying attention to cryptocurrency assets, particularly in the areas of investor fraud and anti-money laundering.
After 2023, places like Singapore and Dubai began allowing licensed operations, and by 2024 and 2025, more countries and regions, including the U.S., U.K., and Hong Kong, started exploring the establishment of laws and regulations specifically addressing cryptocurrency assets.
Around 2021, Binance clearly recognized the trend, stating, ‘The regulatory process presents a fantastic opportunity for proactive companies like Binance to lead industry development.’ Zhao Changpeng publicly stated that by collaborating with regulators and policymakers to establish clear regulatory and legal frameworks, proactively practicing self-regulation, and prioritizing user interests, ‘We will definitely be able to help the next billion users enter the cryptocurrency world.’
That year, Binance expanded its compliance team by 500% and launched the Law Enforcement Request System (LERS) to establish cooperation with governments and law enforcement agencies worldwide, reviewing individual cases while also norming Binance's legal applicability and information disclosure.
This year, Binance's internal compliance expert team has expanded to 1,270 people (21.8% of total employees), and they have responded to over 240,000 law enforcement requests, held over 400 training sessions for agencies worldwide, helping law enforcement agencies utilize blockchain transparency to dismantle criminal networks, recover stolen funds, and shut down harmful platforms.
Under the strategy of proactive compliance and construction, Binance has obtained regulatory licenses from 21 different jurisdictions, meaning it can legally provide cryptocurrency services in these areas.
This year, Binance still plans to increase compliance spending by 33% and hire more compliance talents dedicated to related functions, including transaction monitoring, legal consultation, investigation, and policy implementation. ‘This is Binance's firm commitment to transparency, accountability, and close cooperation with global regulators,’ said Binance CEO Richard Teng.
Step by step, Binance has grown from 0 to 280 million users and a trading volume of $125 trillion; helped 7.5 million users avoid losses totaling $10 billion; allowed users to earn and save over $50 billion in value from its products; and invested $40 million in cryptocurrency charity for education and disaster relief, benefiting 4 million people worldwide...
Predictions indicate that by 2025, the number of internet users is expected to reach 6.54 billion, while Binance's next goal is to ‘enable one billion users to benefit from cryptocurrency assets’. At the pace of Binance, it may not take another eight years to achieve this milestone.
(Disclaimer: Readers are advised to strictly adhere to the laws and regulations of their location; this article does not constitute any investment advice.)
