During a fireside chat as part of Consensus: Distributed on May 12, Changpeng Zhao, the chief executive and founder of Binance, said that the top cryptocurrency exchange is seeing a spike in user registrations.
Zhao noted that new registrations amid the Bitcoin (BTC) halving have recently approached levels last witnessed at the peak of the 2017 bull run.
“The new user registrations are picking up very aggressively, like getting close to the sort of [new users] generated under 2018,” Zhao said.
New user registrations increase "aggressively"
Binance’s CEO also noted that the exchange’s customer support department is receiving a high volume of requests that are indicative of high levels of activity among brand new or casual users, including requests from “new users depositing into wrong addresses,” and “a lot of older users resetting their passwords” after long periods of inactivity.
“All of those indications are very clear, the activity level is definitely much higher than even three or four months ago,” he added.
Catherine Coley on Binance.US 8-Months After Launch
The CEO of Binance.US, Catherine Coley, later joined the conversation to discuss the progress of Binance’s U.S.-based exchange roughly eight months after its launch.
Coley emphasized that the industry has just seen “the beginnings of Binance.U.S” thus far, stating:
“We were able to license and build upon the technology that Binance is able to provide globally, but at an earlier level. So right now, we’ve got just the fundamentals — being able to provide people easy ways to buy crypto, easy ways to put market order in or limit orders.”
Binance.US still navigating regulations
“Our focus is heavily on education and then being able to deliver the lowest fees across American to really lower people’s barriers to entry barriers, [...] so we are still early on in terms of the products we’re providing to our U.S. users,” Coley said.
“It’s just a lengthy process in the U.S. to go through all of the regulatory compliance work,” Zhao added. "Hopefully we will get there and continue to enrich the product.”
Coley also noted Binance.US’ May 11 launch of over-the-counter trading services.