Binance Founder Changpeng Zhao: Registration Volume Has Become Routine
Changpeng Zhao shared community data stating that during the peak in 2018, the platform could not handle the same scale of new user registrations, but this has now become routine. The reposted message indicated that Binance has 330 million users, with approximately 204,000 added in the past 48 hours.
The peak in January 2018 is documented: he mentioned 250,000 new registrations in 24 hours and paused new registrations to prioritize existing users; in interviews, he stated there were 240,000 new users in a single hour and about several million weekly, with Amazon cloud server quotas hitting daily limits and dedicated personnel required for machines. At that time, global exchanges collectively blocked new account openings, leading to peak daily trading volumes.
Official figures show that by the end of 2025, the platform is expected to have around 300 million registered users, with a net increase of about 30 million that year, averaging about 180,000 daily; mid-year figures also indicate "over 310 million verified active users." It took eight years to grow from its launch in July 2017 to surpass 300 million. The community has marked 330 million as a new milestone, although there is a discrepancy with annual report disclosures, but the scale has shifted from millions of blocked orders to a continuous daily increase.
During the same period, European regulations have not relaxed. After withdrawing its MiCA license application in Greece, the platform announced restrictions on new accounts in some EU countries starting in July, while independent testing still claims that some European documents can complete verification and deposit funds. Nearly 1,700 investors in the UK have filed a collective lawsuit against him and the platform for at least £150 million. In 2023, he pleaded guilty to the U.S. Department of Justice, and the platform paid approximately $4.3 billion in fines, with Richard Teng taking over operations.
On the product side, the platform is still expanding: launching a developer layer that connects trading, market data, wallets, payments, and on-chain capabilities to AI agents; using P2P first deposit vouchers to attract new users in the CIS and Central and Eastern Europe. BNB has dropped about 5% in the past week, with prices stabilizing around $720. The normalization of registration volume does not mean that every new user becomes an active trader.
In market mechanics, buyers are retail investors from emerging markets and speculative traders entering through fiat channels, while sellers are the world's largest spot and derivatives matching platform. This is a narrative of capacity rather than price: the bottleneck in 2018 was servers, while in 2026, it will be licenses and lawsuits. Funds enter the order book through account opening bonuses and P2P deposits, benefiting platforms that have turned peak traffic into routine fixed costs, while compliant exchanges still facing country-specific shutdowns and growth teams needing to acquire customers in unlicensed regions are under pressure.
Source: Public Information
ABAB AI Insight
Zhao raised about $15 million in 15 days through an ICO, and in 2018, he drove daily trading volumes to billions through fee discounts and BNB, which also broke the account opening system. The subsequent path has been migration, plea, and handover: the $4.3 billion settlement bought the qualification to continue operations, with him transitioning from CEO to brand and BNB spokesperson. Describing "what couldn't be handled back then is now routine" as a victory for infrastructure, while omitting that customer acquisition has shifted from open registration to regional packages and gray certifications. The eight-year user curve can be depicted as exponential, while the regulatory curve is illustrated by fines and license withdrawals.
The capital path is to turn registered users into collateral for network effects. Three hundred million accounts support the narrative for listing valuation, BNB burn, and on-chain application distribution; if the addition of 200,000 every two days is accurate, it is only slightly above the average for 2025 and far below the shock peak of 250,000 in a single day in 2018. The real money is in orders and deposits, not in registration forms. The test results showing that accounts can still be opened without licenses in Europe indicate that the growth machine prioritizes over compliance in a single legal jurisdiction; the collective lawsuit in the UK spreads the external costs of the same machine into the future.
The analogy is not with Coinbase's listing disclosures, but with early Alipay and WeChat filling accounts before licenses were established to discuss settlement. The industry's position has shifted from "who can operate an exchange" to "who can maintain daily customer acquisition after being fined." This is a control phase: after traffic normalization, pricing power shifts from server expansion to regulatory arbitrage radius.
Structural judgment belongs to the solidification of entry in the reconstruction of the industry chain. The mechanism is: marginal users of crypto trading come from countries with poor fiat channels; whoever can turn peak traffic into routine without crashing will collect tolls from global retail. In 2018, the competition was about machines; in 2026, it will be about how many jurisdictions can still pretend it's just routine.
ABAB News · Cognitive Law
Only peaks that can be sustained will be rewritten as routine.
Registration volume is the poster; deposit volume is the cash flow.
Those who fill accounts first will then negotiate with regulators on how to shut down.