Nine years ago, Binance didn’t exist, and fewer than 6 million people on Earth owned any cryptocurrency at all. This week, the exchange marked its ninth birthday, claiming a user base larger than the population of most G20 nations, and made clear it no longer thinks of itself as just a crypto exchange.
Binance now boasts of 323 million registered users across more than 100 countries, up roughly 7% in the first half of 2026. This represents an estimated 43% of the world’s cryptocurrency holders.
Lifetime trading volume across the platform has crossed $156.4 trillion, a figure the company says exceeds the combined annual GDP of the US, China, Japan, Germany and the UK. It added $11.4 trillion of that in H1 2026 alone, a 7.8% jump from where the tally stood at the end of last year.
Institutional users grew by 9% over the same stretch, even as the broader market slogged through a rougher run than in 2025, suggesting the growth is structural rather than a hype-cycle spike.
Binance’s pivot nobody saw coming
The more revealing story is what Binance has built quietly on top of all that volume. Over the past year, it has pushed into stock trading, ETFs and pre-IPO perpetuals, wiring traditional finance onto the same blockchain-native rails that power its crypto business.
The early traction is faster than most fintechs manage in years.
Since March, TradFi products on Binance have generated more than $80 billion in monthly trading volume. Direct stocks, launched in June, hit $1 billion in assets under management within 30 days and have already logged over $3 billion in cumulative volume. bStocks, tokenised US securities that trade around the clock, crossed $100 million in AUM within two weeks of going live.
Nearly half of that volume trades outside normal US market hours.
That’s the real thesis behind Binance’s next chapter. Co-CEO Richard Teng has described the ambition as building a “financial super app” for three billion users, a target roughly four times the number of people who currently own any crypto at all.
“323 million people chose to trust us with their money. That is not something we take lightly. Every decision we make, every product we build, every market we enter starts with the question of whether it serves the people who put their faith in us. Today, 43% of all crypto holders worldwide use Binance. As the financial frontier moves toward the intersection of crypto and traditional finance, that trust becomes even more significant. Expanding beyond crypto into stocks, ETFs, and tokenised securities is part of that same commitment. Users deserve access to global markets, and we intend to give it to them,” said Richard Teng, Co-CEO, Binance.
Industry estimates put global crypto ownership somewhere between 560 million and 741 million, against an estimated 630 million traditional broking accounts worldwide. Crypto infrastructure may already be reaching more people than legacy stockbroking does, and Binance is positioning itself to own whatever comes after that gap closes.
Nine years, one theme
None of this happened by accident, and none of it happened without the retail traders who built it from the ground up. Binance is marking the anniversary under the banner “Built by You”, a global campaign offering up to $4.5 million in rewards and an interactive tour through nine landmarks in a virtual “Binance City”, each tied to a different arm of the ecosystem.
Also read: Binance co-founder CZ talks going to prison and the cost of moving first in new memoir
It is a fitting theme: Binance went from zero to 323 million accounts largely on the back of everyday users in emerging markets who found in crypto a faster, cheaper way to move and grow money than the systems they had inherited.
Co-CEO Yi He put it plainly, “Nine years ago, we set out to increase the freedom of money globally. What we have built is infrastructure that works for everyone. It works whether you are a retail trader in an emerging market or an institutional investor in a financial centre. When we launched in 2017, fewer than 6 million people owned crypto.
Today, 741 million do, and 323 million of them are on Binance. That is not just growth. It is a shift in how the world accesses finance. We are only at the beginning.”
What started as a single trading pair on a single exchange in 2017 is now angling to sit underneath everything from savings to stock ownership to cross-border payments for a user base measured in the billions rather than the millions.
Nine years in, Binance argues that it’s no longer riding the wave that crypto created. It is trying to become the infrastructure the next one runs on, and the numbers behind its anniversary suggest it has the scale to make a serious run at it.
