On May 30, 2026 at 1:00 p.m. UTC, Binance Head of VIP and Institutional Catherine Chen told CoinDesk that the world's largest crypto exchange is targeting 3 billion active users by 2030 — a ten-fold increase from its current 310 million — and has already begun laying the infrastructure to get there, starting with a move that would have sounded implausible twelve months ago: accepting tokenized BlackRock and Franklin Templeton funds as trading collateral.

The timing is deliberate. Total crypto market capitalization is hovering around $2.7 trillion, down nearly 40% from its all-time high of $4.38 trillion before last October's flash crash. Bitcoin has not reclaimed the $100,000 level since mid-November. Coinbase recently cut 700 staff — 14% of its workforce — citing market conditions. Binance, by Chen's account, is playing a different hand.

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

Not registered accounts — active, KYC-verified users

The 310 million figure is not a vanity metric. Chen was specific: these are "actual active individual users," verified through KYC for retail and KYB for corporate clients, not dormant registrations. That distinction matters for what Binance is selling to institutions: a proven, regulated base, not a theoretical audience.

The gap between where Binance stands today and its 3 billion target is enormous. Getting there requires something other than more retail growth. Chen's answer is institutional infrastructure — and the exchange is building it now, while the market is quiet.

The collateral problem TradFi never solved in crypto

The centerpiece of Binance's institutional build is a triparty banking framework that solves a fundamental custody problem. Institutions want exposure to crypto markets, but they do not want to custody digital assets directly or leave capital sitting on an exchange. They want to hold their assets with existing banking partners and pledge them as collateral — the same structure they use in traditional markets.

Binance has addressed this by integrating tokenized money market funds from BlackRock and Franklin Templeton as eligible collateral in the triparty ecosystem. Instead of moving cash onto the exchange or manually rolling Treasury futures, institutional traders can now pledge real-time, yield-bearing tokenized shares to back their positions. The collateral earns yield while it is pledged. The institution never loses custody to an exchange.

This is not a pilot or a roadmap item. Chen said the integration is live. The yield-bearing structure removes the cost of capital from the equation — a legitimate friction point that has kept TradFi desks from scaling crypto exposure.

"Whether it is equities, treasury, or debt, this is the way forward," Chen said, pointing to a 12-to-18-month window where RWA tokenization matures rapidly.

Closing the $1.8 billion infrastructure gap

Alongside the collateral framework, Binance is attacking what Chen calls the institutional spending disparity. TradFi desks spend over $2 billion annually on Order Management Systems. Crypto infrastructure spend sits at roughly $185 million — less than a tenth of that. The delta represents both a gap in capability and an opportunity.

Binance's new OMS toolkit, built through partnerships with Coin Metrics, Talos, and 3Commas, is designed to close it. The pitch to institutions: stop building proprietary crypto infrastructure from scratch and use Binance's instead.

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

The Crypto-as-a-Service platform, launched in September 2025 for financial institutions, has onboarded more than 15 major clients since launch. Chen did not name them.

What this signals

The BlackRock and Franklin Templeton integration is the piece that elevates this from a corporate strategy announcement to a structural development.

BlackRock's BUIDL fund and Franklin Templeton's FOBXX are the two dominant tokenized money market products by assets under management. Both are live on public blockchains. Binance accepting them as trading collateral means those instruments are now operational plumbing at the world's largest exchange — not a demo or a press release.

The significance runs in two directions. For RWA tokenization, it is the clearest signal to date that yield-bearing on-chain instruments are moving from institutional experiment to practical infrastructure. The question of whether tokenized Treasuries would ever find real utility beyond holding in a wallet now has a partial answer: they can serve as collateral on a $7 billion daily-volume exchange.

For Binance, it is a calculated bet on where the next growth cycle comes from. If 310 million retail users is the current ceiling in a bear market, the next ten-fold expansion requires institutional capital at scale. The triparty framework, the OMS toolkit, the CaaS platform — each is a layer of the same argument: that the institutions who spent 2021-2024 watching from the sidelines are ready to enter, and that the exchange that built the right rails while no one was watching will be the one they enter through.

Chen's 2030 target is aggressive. Getting from 310 million to 3 billion users implies either a dramatic expansion of crypto's total addressable market or Binance capturing the bulk of that expansion, or both. The institutional infrastructure Binance is building is the mechanism. The bear market is the window.

Source: CoinDesk interview with Catherine Chen, Binance Head of VIP and Institutional, published May 30, 2026, 1:00 p.m. UTC. Read the original.