Binance CEO Claims a Quarter of a Million New Users in One Hour

In an interview with Bloomberg television, the CEO of Binance revealed the flabbergasting extent of demand for cryptocurrency trading.

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Binance is the world’s biggest cryptocurrency exchange. Founded in China, it recently relocated to Tokyo after its native government banned cryptocurrency exchanges.  On the fifth on January, a message appeared on its site informing users that it was temporarily disabling user registration “due to the overwhelming surge in popularity”.

In an interview with Bloomberg, CEO Zhao Chanpeng said that after re-opening registration, 240,000 people registered in one hour, “so we’re growing basically by a couple of million every week”.

Binance took its first breaths about 5 months ago, and it was just after Christmas that it announced having reached 3 million users. Yesterday it announced 5 million. According to Coinmarketcap, it is the most heavily used cryptocurrency exchange in the world right now, processing $5,851,344,587 in the last 24 hours alone.

In the interview, Changpeng talked about the upgrades that his company has been making in the downtime – according to him, the core system is holding up, but customer service has not been able to keep up with the demand. When asked about the demographics of the user base, he said that the average user was male, aged 25-35. And that it is not only private users that are interested:

“We’re beginning to get a lot of interest from institutional investors. People are asking us for corporate verification, and also corporate features where there are sub accounts under a main account, different kinds of risk management – we’re getting that a lot now.”

Binance recently partnered with a very popular video streaming service called UpLive, which itself has collected 60,000 users in a little over a year. Binance has also been offering luxury cars as giveaways with new currency pairs, awarded to those that trade most with them. Changpeng responded to a question about regulatory crackdowns: “It does make an impact on our business, but I don’t think there’s any particular threat.”

Binance’s native cryptocurrency, Binance Coin, is currently number 29 on Coinmarketcap’s rankings, with a market cap of 1.7 billion USD.